T. C. Boyle Stories

BIG GAME

You could shoot anything you wanted, for a price, even the elephant, but Bernard tended to discourage the practice. It made an awful mess, for one thing, and when all was said and done it was the big animals — the elephant, the rhino, the water buff and giraffe — that gave the place its credibility, not to mention ambiance. They weren’t exactly easy to come by, either. He still regretted the time he’d let the kid from the heavy-metal band pot one of the giraffes — even though he’d taken a cool twelve thousand dollars to the bank on that one. And then there was the idiot from MGM who opened up on a herd of zebra and managed to decapitate two ostriches and lame the Abyssinian ass in the process. Well, it came with the territory, he supposed, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t carry enough insurance on the big stuff to buy out half the L.A. Zoo if he had to. He was just lucky nobody had shot himself in the foot yet. Or the head. Of course, he was insured for that, too.

Bernard Puff pushed himself up from the big mahogany table and flung the dregs of his coffee down the drain. He wasn’t exactly overwrought, but he was edgy, his stomach sour and clenched round the impermeable lump of his breakfast cruller, his hands afflicted with the little starts and tremors of the coffee shakes. He lit a cigarette to calm himself and gazed out the kitchen window on the dromedary pen, where one of the moth-eaten Arabians was methodically peeling the bark from an elm tree. He looked at the thing in amazement, as if he’d never seen it before — the flexible lip and stupid eyes, the dully working jaw — and made a mental note to offer a special on camels. The cigarette tasted like tin, like death. Somewhere a catbird began to call out in its harsh mewling tones.

The new people were due any minute now, and the prospect of new people always set him off — there were just too many things that could go wrong. Half of them didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other, they expected brunch at noon and a massage an hour later, and they bitched about everything, from the heat to the flies to the roaring of the lions at night. Worse: they didn’t seem to know what to make of him, the men regarding him as a subspecies of the blue-collar buddy, regaling him with a nonstop barrage of lickerish grins, dirty jokes and fractured grammar, and the women treating him like a cross between a maître d’ and a water carrier. Dudes and greenhorns, all of them. Parvenus. Moneygrubbers. The kind of people who wouldn’t know class if it bit them.

Savagely snubbing out the cigarette in the depths of the coffee mug, Bernard wheeled round on the balls of his feet and plunged through the swinging doors and out into the high dark hallway that gave onto the foyer. It was stifling already, the overhead fans chopping uselessly at the dead air round his ears and the sweat prickling at his new-shaven jowls as he stomped down the hall, a big man in desert boots and khaki shorts, with too much belly and something overeager and graceless in his stride. There was no one in the foyer and no one at the registration desk. (Espinoza was out feeding the animals — Bernard could hear the hyenas whooping in the distance — and the new girl — what was her name? — hadn’t made it to work on time yet. Not once.) The place seemed deserted, though he knew Orbalina would be making up the beds and Roland sneaking a drink somewhere — probably out behind the lion cages.

For a long moment Bernard stood there in the foyer, framed against a bristling backdrop of kudu and oryx heads, as he checked the reservation card for the tenth time that morning:

Mike and Nicole Bender

BENDER REALTY

15125 Ventura Blvd.

Encino, California

Real estate people. Jesus. He’d always preferred the movie crowd — or even the rock-and-rollers, with their spiked wristbands and pouf hairdos. At least they were willing to buy into the illusion that Puff’s African Game Ranch, situated on twenty-five hundred acres just outside Bakersfield, was the real thing — the Great Rift Valley, the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti — but the real estate people saw every crack in the plaster. And all they wanted to know was how much he’d paid for the place and was the land subdividable.

He looked up into the yellow-toothed grin of the sable mounted on the wall behind him — the sable his father had taken in British East Africa back in the thirties — and let out a sigh. Business was business, and in the long run it didn’t matter a whit who perforated his lions and gazelles — just as long as they paid. And they always paid, up front and in full. Bernard saw to that.

“What was it, Nik, six months ago when we went to Gino Parducci’s for dinner? It was six months, wasn’t it? And didn’t I say we’d do the African thing in six months? Didn’t I?”

Nicole Bender was curled up in the passenger seat of the white Jaguar XJS her husband had given her for Valentine’s Day. A pile of knitting magazines lay scattered in her lap, atop a set of bamboo needles trailing an embryonic garment in a shade so pale it defied categorization. She was twenty-seven, blond, a former actress/model/poet/singer whose trainer had told her just two days earlier that she had perhaps the most perfectly sculpted physique of any woman he’d ever worked with. Of course, he was paid to say things like that, but in her heart she suspected they were true, and she needed to hear them. She turned to her husband. “Yes,” she said. “You did. But I pictured us in Kenya or Tanzania, to tell the truth.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he fired back impatiently, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” the words coming so. fast they might have been bullets squeezed from one of the glistening new big-bore rifles in the trunk, “but you know I can’t take six weeks off from work, not now when the new Beverly Hills office is about to open up and the Montemoretto deal is all but in the bag … and besides, it’s dangerous over there, what with the next revolution or war or whatever coming down every six minutes, and who do you think they’re going to blame when the roof caves in? White people, right? And where do you think you’ll want to be then?”

Mike Bender was a barely contained factory of energy, a steamroller of a man who had risen from receptionist to king and despot of his own real estate empire in the space of twelve short years. He was given to speechifying, the precious words dropping from his lips like coins from a slot machine, his fingertips alighting on his tongue, his hair, his ears, the crotch of his pants and his elbows as he spoke, writhing with the nervous energy that had made him rich. “And plus you’ve got your tsetse flies and black mambas and beriberi and the plague and god knows what all over there — I mean, picture Mexico, only a hundred times worse. No, listen, trust me — Gino swore this place is as close as it gets to the real thing, only without the hassles.” He lowered his sunglasses to give her a look. “You’re telling me you really want to get your ass chewed off in some lopsided tent in, in”—he couldn’t seem to think of a place sufficiently grim, so he improvised—“Zambeziland?”

Nicole shrugged, giving him a glimpse of the pouty little half-smile she used to work up for the photographers when she was nineteen and doing the summer-wear ads for JCPenney.

“You’ll get your zebra-skin rug yet, you wait and see,” Mike assured her, “and a couple lions’ heads and gazelles or whatever for the wall in the den, okay?”

The Jaguar shot across the desert like a beam of light. Nicole lifted the knitted needles from her lap, thought better of it, and set them down again. “Okay,” she said in a breathy little whisper, “but I just hope this place isn’t too, you know, tacky.“

A sudden harsh laugh erupted from the back seat, where Mike Bender’s twelve-year-old daughter, Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Bender, was stretched out supine with the last ten issues of Bop and a sixpack of New York Seltzer. “Get real, will you? I mean like shooting lions in Bakersfield? Tacky city. Tacky, tacky, tacky.”

Up front, behind the wheel, his buttocks caressed by the supple kid leather of the seat and visions of bontebok leaping before his eyes, Mike Bender was mildly annoyed. He’d had an itch to hunt lion and elephant and rhino since he was a kid and first read Confessions of a White Hunter and the Classic Comics version of King Solomon’s Mines. And this was his chance. So maybe it wasn’t Africa, but who had the time to go on safari? If he could spare three days he was lucky. And you couldn’t shoot anything over there anyway. Not anymore. Everything was a preserve now, a game park, a conservancy. There was no more white hunters. Just photographers.

He wanted to say “Give me a break, will you?” in his most imperious voice, the voice that sent his sales force scurrying for cover and his competitors into shock, but he held his peace. Nothing was going to ruin this for him. Nothing.

It was midafternoon. The sun hung overhead like an egg shirred in a cup. The thermometer in the feed shed was pushing a hundred and fifteen degrees, nothing was moving but for the vultures aloft in the poor bleached expanse of the sky, and the whole world seemed to have gone to sleep. Except for Bernard. Bernard was beside himself — the Benders had been due at 10:00 A.M. and here it was quarter past two and still they hadn’t arrived. He’d had Espinoza let the Tommies and eland out of their pens at nine, but he was afraid they’d all be lying up in the heat, and by noon he’d sent him out to round them up again. The giraffes were nowhere to be seen, and the elephant, tethered to a live oak Bernard had pruned to resemble an umbrella thorn, was looking as rumpled and dusty as a heap of Taiwanese luggage abandoned at the airport.

Bernard stood in the glare of the dried-up yard, squinting out on the screen of elephant grass and euphorbia he’d planted to hide the oil rig (if you knew it was there you could just detect the faintest motion of the big steel arm as it rose and fell and rose and fell again). He felt hopeless. For all the effort he’d put into it, the place looked like a circus camp, the bombed-out remains of a zoo, a dusty flat baking former almond ranch in the sun-blasted southeast corner of the San Joaquin Valley — which is exactly what it was. What would the Benders think? More important, what would they think at six hundred dollars a day, payable in advance, plus prices that ranged from a thousand a pop on the gazelles on up to twelve thousand for a lion and “priced as available” for the elephant? Real estate people had balked on him before, and business hadn’t exactly been booming lately.

The vultures wheeled overhead. He was running sweat. The sun felt like a firm hand steering him toward the cool of the kitchen and a tall glass of quinine water (which he drank for effect rather than therapeutic value: there wasn’t a malarial mosquito within a thousand miles). He was just about to pack it in when he caught the distant glint of sun on safety glass and saw the Benders’ car throwing up dust clouds at the far end of the drive.

“Roland!” he bellowed, and every mortal ounce of him was in motion now. “Let the monkeys out into the trees! And the parrots!” Suddenly he was jogging across the dusty lot and up the path to where the elephant lay collapsed beneath the tree. He was working at the slip of the tether to set her loose and wondering if Roland would have the sense to stir up the lions and hyenas for the sake of sound effects, when suddenly she rose to her feet with a great blowing snort and gave a feeble trumpet.

Well. And that was a break — at least now he wouldn’t have to use the ivory goad.

Bernard looked up at the old elephant in wonder — she still had a bit of showmanship in her, after all. Either that, or it was senile dementia. She was old — Bernard didn’t know quite how old, though he did know she was a veteran of thirty-eight years with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus who’d performed under the name “Bessie Bee” and responded to “Shamba”—that is, if you happened to have the ivory goad in your hand. Bernard shot a glance up the drive, where a white Jaguar sedan was beginning to define itself against a billowing backdrop of dust, and then he heard the screech of the monkeys as they shot out of their cages and up into the trees, and he began to compose himself. He forced a smile, all red-cheeked and long-toothed, cinched the leopard-skin belt, squared his pith helmet and marched forward to greet his guests.

By the time the Benders rolled up to the veranda, the parrots were in the trees, the marabou stork was pecking at a spot of offal in the dirt, and the lions were roaring lustily from their hidden pens out back. Roland, decked out in his Masai toga and lion’s-tooth necklace, bounded down the steps with alacrity to hold open the door for Bender, while Bessie Bee shambled around in the near distance, flapping her ears and blowing about in the dust. “Mr. Bender,” Bernard cried, extending his hand to a fortyish man in sunglasses and polo shirt, “welcome to Africa.”

Bender sprang out of the car like a child at the zoo. He was tall, lean, tanned — why did they all have to look like tennis pros? Bernard wondered — and stood there twitching a moment in the heat. He pumped Bernard’s hand professionally and then launched into a lip-jerking, ear-tugging, foot-thumping apology: “Sorry we’re late, Bernard, but my wife — have you met my wife? — my wife just had to get a couple rolls of film and we wound up buying out half of Reynoso’s Camera in Bakersfield — you know it? — good prices. Real good prices. Hell, we needed a new video camera anyway, especially with”—he gestured to take in the house, the outbuildings, the elephant, the monkeys in the trees and the sun-blasted plains beyond—“all this.”

Bernard was nodding, smiling, murmuring agreement, but he was on autopilot — his attention was fixed on the wife, whom Roland was fussing over now on the far side of the car. She raised her lovely white arms to fluff her hair and imprison her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses and Bernard called out a greeting in his best British-colonial accent (though he was British by ancestry only and had never in his life been east of Reno). The second wife, of course, he was thinking as she returned his greeting with a vague little pouting smile.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Bernard said in response to some further idiocy from the husband’s lips, his watery blue eyes shifting to the daughter now — as black-headed as an Indian, and nearly as dark — and he saw right away that she was trouble, the sort of child who cultivates ugliness as a weapon.

Nicole Bender gave him a long slow appraisal over the hood of the car, and in the next moment he was ducking round the grille to squeeze her hand as if he were trying on a glove for size. “Beastly day,” he said, proud of the Britishism, and then he was leading her up the broad stone steps and into the house, while her husband fumbled with an armload of guns and the daughter slouched along behind, already complaining about something in a nagging querulous little whine of a voice.

“I’m not saying that, Mike — you’re not listening to me. I said the gazelles are very nice and they’ll be perfect for the office, but I wanted something, well, bigger for the front hall and at least three of the zebra — two for the den, I thought, and we’re going to need one for the ski lodge … you know, to hide that ugly paneling behind the bar?”

Mike Bender was deep into his fourth gin and tonic. Already the elation he’d felt over his first kill had begun to dissipate, replaced now by a gnawing sense of frustration and anger — why couldn’t Nikki shut her face, even for a second? No sooner had they changed clothes and got out there on the savannah or veldt or whatever you wanted to call it, than she’d started in. He’d squeezed off a clean shot at a Thomson’s gazelle at two hundred yards and before the thing’s head had hit the ground, she was running it down. Oh, she gasped, as if she’d been surprised on the toilet, but it’s so small, isn’t it? And then she struck a pose for Puff and the colored guy who carried the guns and skinned out the carcasses. Almost like a rabbit with horns.

And now the great white hunter was leaning across the table to reassure her, his gut drawn tight against the khaki safari shirt, his accent so phony it was like something out of a Monty Python routine. “Mrs. Bender, Nicole,” he began, mopping his blood blister of a face with a big checked handkerchief, “we’ll go out for zebra in the morning, when it’s cool, and if it’s three you want, we’ll get them, there’s no problem with that. Four, if you like. Five. If you’ve got the bullets, we’ve got the game.”

Mike watched as the canny crewcut head swiveled toward him. “And Mike,” Puff said, as amenable as any tour guide but with just the right hint of stagery in his voice, “in the evening, it’s the big stuff, the man-maker, old Simba himself.”

As if in response, there was a cough and roar from somewhere out beyond the darkened windows, and Mike Bender could feel the wildness of it on the thin night air — lion, the lion he’d dreamed about since his aunt had taken him to the Central Park Zoo as a boy and the roar of the great shaggy yellow-eyed things had shaken him to his primordial root. To be out there, in that African night that was haunted with predators, big-headed and thick-skinned, the pounce, the slash, the crack of sinew and bone — it was at once terrifying and wonderful. But what was that smell of oil?

“What do you say, old man? Are you game?” Puff was leering at him now, and behind Puff’s blocky leonine figure, the faces of his wife and daughter, arrayed like tribal masks.

Nothing fazed Mike Bender, the King of Encino. No seller could hold out against him, no buyer hope for more. His contracts were vises, his promotions sledgehammers, his holdings as solid as a mountain of iron. “I’m game,” he said, touching his lips, running his fingers through his hair, jabbing at his elbows and underarms in a rising plume of metabolic excess. “Just oil up my H&H Magnum and point me toward ‘em; it’s what I’ve wanted all my life—”

There was a silence and his words seemed to hang in the air, empty of conviction. His daughter crouched over her plate, looking as if she were sucking on something rotten; his wife had that alert, let’s-go-shopping look in her glittering little eyes. “Really. I mean, ever since I was a kid, and — how many are out there, anyway? Or do you keep count?”

Puff stroked the graying stubble of his head. There was another roar, muted this time, followed by the stabbed-in-the-belly whoop of the hyena. “Oh, we’ve got a good-sized pride out there — twelve or fourteen, I’d say, and a few rogue males.”

“Are there any big ones, with manes? That’s what we want.” He shifted his gaze to Nicole. “Maybe the whole thing, stuffed, standing up on its hind legs, what do you think, Nik? For maybe the reception room at the Beverly Hills office?” And then he made a joke of it: “Hey, if Prudential can get away with it—”

Nicole looked satisfied. So did Puff. But his daughter wasn’t about to let him off so easily. She let out a snort of contempt, and the three of them turned toward her. “And so you go and kill some poor lion that isn’t hurting anybody, and what’s that supposed to prove?”

Puff exchanged a look with him, as if to say, Now isn’t that adorable?

Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose pushed aside her salad plate. Her hair hung in her eyes in greasy black coils. She’d eaten nothing, having separated the tomatoes from the greens and the greens from the croutons and the croutons from the gar-banzo beans. “Sting,” she spat, “Brigitte Bardot, the New Kids, all of them say it’s like animal death camps, like Hitler, and they’re doing this special concert to save the animals in France, in Paris—”

“One lion more or less isn’t going to hurt anybody,” Nicole said, cutting the child off, and her mouth was drawn tight against the swell of her collagen-enhanced lips. “And I think your father’s idea is super. An erect lion standing there as people come in the door — it’s, it’s symbolic is what it is.”

Mike Bender couldn’t tell if he was being ribbed or not. “Listen, Jasmine,” he began, and his leg started to thump under the table as he tugged at his ear and fooled with his cutlery.

“Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose,” she fired back.

Mike knew she’d always hated her name, an inspiration of her mother, the sort of crackbrained woman who saw spirits in the sunset and believed that he was the reincarnation of John D. Rockefeller. To throw it up to him, and to remind him of his ex-wife and all the mistakes he’d ever made or contemplated, his daughter insisted on her full name. Always.

“Okay: Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose,” he said, “listen to me. All of this hippie-dippy save-the-environment crap might be all right if you’re twelve, but you’ve got to realize hunting is as natural a part of man as, as—”

“Eating or drinking,” Puff put in, rounding off the participle with a pseudo-Etonian ring.

“Right!” Jasmine cried, on her feet now, her eyes like sinkholes, her mouth twitching at the corners. “And so’s shitting, farting and, and fucking!” And then she was gone, stamping down the trophy-hung hallway to her room, where she flung the door to with a thunderous crash.

A moment of silence descended on the table. Puff’s eyes lingered on Nicole as she raised her arms to stretch and show off her breasts and the prim white pockets of shaved flesh under her arms. “Cute kid, huh?” he said. There was no mistaking the sarcasm this time.

“Real cute,” Nicole said, and they were in league.

Turning to Mike as the colored guy came through the door with a platter of gazelle steaks and mesquite-roasted ears of corn, Puff let his voice grow warm and confidential. “Zebra in the morning, Mike,” he said. “You’ll like that.” He leveled his watery gaze on him. “And then”—the gazelle steaks hitting the table, little dollops of blood-running flesh—“and then we load up for lion.”

It wasn’t that he bolted, actually — Bernard had seen worse, much worse — but he was on the verge of it. Either that or he was about to pass out. Any way you sliced it, it was a bad situation, the kind of encounter that made Bernard wish he’d never heard of Africa, lions, game parks or real estate people.

They’d come on the lion in the old almond grove. The trees there were like twisted antlers, leafless and dead, set out in rows as far as you could see, and the ground beneath them was littered with fallen branches. “Not too close now,” Bernard had warned, but Bender wanted to be sure of the shot, and he got himself in a bind. In the next moment he was standing there knee-deep in the litter, jerking and shrugging like a spastic, the gun to his shoulder and nowhere to go, and the lion was coming at him with as much pure malice as Bernard had seen in his fourteen years as proprietor of Puff’s African Game Ranch. And while Bernard didn’t like to intervene — it always caused hard feelings after the fact — Mrs. Bender was a heartbeat away from being an aggrieved widow and his own insurance rates were about to go through the roof, never mind the lawsuits. It was a moment, no doubt about it.

The night before, after the Benders had gone off to bed, Bernard had had Espinoza go out and stir up the lions a bit and then set them loose — without their supper. That always put them in a mood, no matter how old, toothless and gimpy they might be. Let them go a night without horse meat and they were as savage as anything you’d encounter anywhere on earth. For Bernard, it was standard practice. Give the guests their money’s worth, that was his motto. If they suspected that the lions were penned up ninety-nine percent of the time, none of them let on — for all they knew the beasts lived out there among the drought-ravaged almond trees and camouflaged oil rigs. And besides, it wasn’t as if they had anywhere to go — the entire property was circumscribed by a twenty-foot-deep dry moat with a twelve-foot-high electrified fence rising up behind it. The ones the guests didn’t put holes in would just wander back to their cages in a day or so, roaring their bellies out for horse meat and offal.

In the morning, after a breakfast of kippers and eggs and while the daughter slept in, Bernard had taken the Benders out after their zebra. They’d driven out to the water hole — an abandoned Olympic-sized swimming pool Bernard had planted up to look natural — and, after some discussion of price, the Benders — or, rather, the wife — decided on five. She was something, the wife. As good-looking a woman as Bernard had ever laid eyes on, and a better shot than her husband. She took two of the zebra at a hundred and fifty yards, barely a mark on the hides. “You can shoot, little lady,” Bernard said as they sauntered up to the nearest of the fallen zebra.

The zebra lay there on its side beneath the knifing sun, and already the first flies had begun to gather. Bender was crouched over one of the carcasses in the near distance, inspecting it for bullet holes, and Roland was back in the Jeep, whetting his skinning knife. From the hills beyond, one of the starved lions let loose with an irascible roar.

Nicole smiled at him, pretty — awfully pretty — in her Banana Republic shorts and safari shirt. “I try,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt to reveal a peach-colored halter top decorated with a gold pin in the shape of a rifle. He had to bend close to read the inscription: Nicole Bender, Supermarksman Award, N.R.A., 1989.

Then it was lunch and siesta, followed by gin and bitters and a few hands at canasta to while away the waning hours of the afternoon. Bernard did everything he could to amuse the lady, and not just in the interest of business — there was something there, something beating hot and hard beneath the mask of blusher and eyeliner and the puffed-up lips, and he couldn’t help feeling the tug of it. It had been tough since Stella Rae had left him, and he took his tumbles where he could find them — after all, that came with the territory too.

At any rate, they took the Jeep Wrangler, a cooler of beer, Bender’s.375 Holland & Holland, the lady’s Winchester.458 Mag and his own stopper — the.600 Nitro — and headed out to where the twisted black branches of the orchard raked the flanks of the hills in the far corner of the ranch. It was where the lions always went when you set them loose. There was a little brook there — it was a torrent in season, but now it wasn’t much more than a trickle. Still, they could lap up some water and roll in the grass and find a poor striped shade beneath the naked branches of the trees.

From the start, even when they were still on the gin and bitters and waiting out the heat, Bender had seemed edgy. The man couldn’t sit still, rattling on about escrows and titles and whatnot, all the while tugging at his lips and ears and tongue like a third-base coach taking signals from the dugout. It was nerves, that’s what it was: Bernard had taken enough dudes out there to recognize a fellow measuring out his own manhood against that big tawny thing stalking his imagination. One guy — he was a TV actor; maybe a fag, even — had got himself so worked up he’d overloaded on the gin and pissed his pants before they got the Jeep started. Bernard had seen him a hundred times since on the flickering tube, a hulking muscular character with a cleft chin and flashing eyes who was forever smashing crooks in the face and snaring women by the waist, but he could never forget the way the guy’s eyes had vanished in his head as the piss stain spread from his crotch to his thighs and beyond. He took one look at Bender and knew there was trouble on the horizon.

They’d agreed on $11,500 for a big male with a mane, Bernard knocking off the odd five hundred because they’d taken the two extra zebra and he figured he’d give them a break. The only male he had of any size was Claude, who must have been something in his day but was now the leonine equivalent of a nonagenarian living on a diet of mush in a nursing home. Bernard had picked him up for a song at a flea-bitten circus in Guadalajara, and he must have been twenty-five years old if he was a day. He was half-blind, he stank like one of the walking dead and the molars on the lower left side of his jaw were so rotten he howled through his food when he ate. But he looked the part, especially at a distance, and he still carried some of the flesh he’d put on in his youth — and the pain in his jaw made him cranky; savage, even. He would do, Bernard had thought. He would do just fine.

But there was Bender, stuck in a morass of dead black branches, trembling all over like a man in an ice bath, and the lion coming at him. The first shot skipped in the dirt at two hundred feet and took Claude’s left hind paw off at the joint, and he gave out with a roar of such pure raging claw-gutting bone-crunching nastiness that the idiot nearly dropped his rifle. Or so it seemed from where Bernard was standing with the Mrs. and Roland, fifteen yards back and with the angle to the right. Claude was a surprise. Instead of folding up into himself and skittering for the bushes, he came on, tearing up the dirt and roaring as if he’d been set afire — and Bender was jerking and twitching and twittering so much he couldn’t have hit the side of a beer truck. Bernard could feel his own heart going as he lifted the Nitro to his shoulder, and then there was the head-thumping blast of the gun and old Claude suddenly looked like a balled-up carpet with a basket of ground meat spread on top of it.

Bender turned to him with a white face. “What the—?” he stammered, and he was jerking at his fingers and flailing his arms. “What do you think you’re doing?”

It was Bernard’s moment. A jetliner rode high overhead, bound for the northwest, a silver rivet in the sky. There was an absolute, unutterable silence. The wife held her peace, the remaining lions cowered somewhere in the grass and every bird on the ranch was holding its breath in the dying wake of that rolling cannonade. “Saving your bloody life,” Bernard snarled, hot and disgusted and royally pissed off, but proud, as always, of the Britishism.

Mike Bender was angry — too angry to eat his kippered whatever and the deep-fried toast and runny eggs. And where was the coffee, for god’s sake? They were in Bakersfield, after all, and not some canvas tent in Uganda. He barked at the colored guy — all tricked up to look like a native, but with an accent right out of Compton — and told him he wanted coffee, black and strong, even if he had to drive to Oildale for it. Nicole sat across the table and watched him with mocking eyes. Her zebra had been perfect, but he’d fouled up two of the three he’d shot: But Mike, she’d said, we can’t hang these — they’ll look like colanders. And then the business with the lion. He’d looked bad on that one, and what was worse, he was out eleven and a half thousand bucks and there was nothing to show for it. Not after Puff blew the thing away. It was just meat and bone, that’s all. Shit, the thing didn’t even have a head after the great white hunter got done with it.

“C’mon, Mike,” Nicole said, and she reached out to pat his hand but he snatched it away in a rage. “C’mon, baby, it’s not the end of the world.” He looked at her in that moment, the triumph shining in her eyes, and he wanted to slap her, choke her, get up from the table, snatch a rifle from the rack and pump a couple slugs into her.

He was about to snap back at her when the swinging doors to the kitchen parted and the colored guy came in with a pot of coffee and set it on the table. Roland, that was his name. He was surprised they didn’t call him Zulu or Jambo or something to go along with the silly skirts that were supposed to make him look like a native. Christ, he’d like to get up and drill him too, for that matter. About the only break he’d had on this trip was that Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose had taken to sleeping till noon.

“Mike,” Nicole pleaded, but he wouldn’t hear her. Brooding, burning, plotting his revenge on every lender, shopkeeper and homeowner from the San Fernando Valley to Hancock Park, Mike Bender sipped moodily at his tepid instant coffee and awaited the great white hunter.

Puff was late to breakfast, but he looked rejuvenated — had he dyed his hair, was that it? — beaming, a fountain of energy, as if he’d stolen the flame from the King of Encino himself. “Good morning,” he boomed in his phony West End accent, practically inhaling his mustache, and then he gave Nicole a look that was unmistakable and Mike felt it all pouring out of him, like lava from a volcano.

“No more lions, right?” Mike said, his voice low and choked.

“Afraid not,” Puff answered, sitting himself down at the head of the table and smearing a slab of toast with Marmite. “As I told you yesterday, we’ve got all the females you want, but the males are juveniles, no manes at all to speak of.”

“That stinks.”

Bernard regarded Bender for a long moment and saw the child who’d never grown up, the rich kid, the perennial hacker and duffer, the parvenu stifled. He looked from Bender to the wife and back again — what was she doing with a clown like that? — and had a fleeting but powerful vision of her stretched out beside him in bed, breasts, thighs, puffy lips and all. “Listen, Mike,” he said, “forget it. It happens to everybody. I thought we’d go for eland today—”

“Eland. Shit on eland.”

“All right, then — water buff. A lot of them say Mbogo is the most dangerous animal in Africa, bar none.”

The sunny eyes went dark with rage. “This isn’t Africa,” Bender spat. “It’s Bakersfield.”

Bernard had tried hard, and he hated it when they did that, when they punctured the illusion he so carefully nurtured. It was the illusion he was selling, after all — close your eyes and you’re in Africa — and in a way he’d wanted the place to be Africa, wanted to make the old stories come alive, wanted to bring back the thrill of the great days, if only for a moment at a time. But it was more than that, too: Puff’s African Game Ranch stood as a testament and memorial to the towering figure of Bernard’s father.

Bernard Puff, Sr., had been one of the last great white hunters of East Africa — friend and compatriot of Percival and Ionides, host to some of the biggest names of American cinema and European aristocracy. He married an American heiress and they built a place in the White Highlands, dined with Isak Dinesen, ate game the year round. And then the war turned the place on its head and he sought refuge in America, losing himself in the vastness of the Southwest and the pockets of his in-laws. As a boy, Bernard had thrilled to the stories of the old days, fingering the ragged white scar a bush pig’s tusks had left on his father’s forearm, cleaning and oiling the ancient weapons that had stopped rhino, elephant, leopard and lion, gazing for hours into the bright glass eyes of the trophies mounted on the wall in the den, the very names — sable, kudu, bushbuck, kongoni — playing like an incantation in his head. He’d tried to do it justice, had devoted his life to it, and now here was this sorehead, this condominium peddler, running it all down.

“All right,” he said. “Granted. What do you want me to do? I’ve got more lions coming in at the end of the month, prime cats they’ve trapped and relocated from Tsavo East …” (He was fudging here: actually, he had an emaciated sack of bones lined up at the San Francisco Zoo, a cat so old the public was offended by it, and another that had broken its leg three times jumping through a hoop with a West German circus.) “Eland we have, water buff, oryx, gazelle, hyena — I’ve even got a couple ostrich for you. But unless you want a female, no lion. I’m sorry.”

And then, a light shining up from the depths, the glitter came back into the dealmaker’s eyes, the smile widened, the tennis pro and backyard swimmer climbed out from behind the mask of the petulant real estate wonder boy. Bender was grinning. He leaned forward. “What about the elephant?”

“What about it?” Bernard lifted the toast to his lips, then set it down carefully again on the edge of his plate. The wife was watching him now, and Roland, refilling the coffee mugs, paused to give him a look.

“I want it.”

Bernard stared down at the plate and fussed a moment with the coffeepot, the sugar, the cream. He hated to part with her, though he was pretty sure he could replace her — and the feed bills were killing him. Even in her dotage, Bessie Bee could put away more in an afternoon than a herd of Guernseys would go through in a winter. He gave the wife a cool glance, then shot his eyes at Bender. “Eighteen grand,” he said.

Bender looked uncertain, his eyes glittering still, but sunk in on themselves, as if in awe at the enormity of the deal. “I’ll want the head,” he said finally, “the whole thing, stuffed and mounted — and yes, I know it’s big, but I can deal with that, I’ve got the space, believe me … and the feet, I want the feet, for those, uh, what do you call them, umbrella stands?”

They found her in a brushy ravine, just beyond the swimming-pool-cum-water-hole. She was having a dust bath, powdering her pitted hide with fine pale dirt till she looked like an enormous wad of dough rolled in flour. Bernard could see where she’d trampled the high grass that hid the blue lip of the pool and uprooted half a ton of water lily and cattail, which she’d mounded up in a festering heap on the coping. He cursed under his breath when he saw the stand of eucalyptus she’d reduced to splinters and the imported fever tree she’d stripped of bark. It was his policy to keep her tethered — precisely to avoid this sort of wholesale destruction — but when there were guests on the ranch, he let her roam. He was regretting it now, and thinking he’d have to remember to get Espinoza to call the landscaping company first thing in the morning, when Bender’s voice brought him back to the moment. The voice was harsh, petulant, a rising squawk of protest: “But it’s only got one tusk!”

Bernard sighed. It was true — she’d broken off half her left tusk somewhere along the line, but he’d gotten so used to her he hardly noticed. But there was Bender, sitting beside him in the Jeep, the wife in the back, the guns stacked up and the cooler full, and Bender was going to try to gouge him on the price, he could see it coming.

“When we said eighteen, I assumed we were talking a trophy animal,” Bender said, and Bernard turned to him. “But now, I don’t know.”

Bernard just wanted it over with. Something told him he was making a mistake in going after Bessie Bee — the place wouldn’t seem the same without her — but he was committed at this point, and he didn’t want any arguments. “Okay,” he sighed, shifting the weight of his paunch from left to right. “Seventeen.”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen-five, and that’s as low as I’m going to go. You don’t know what it’s like to skin out something like this, let alone disposing of the carcass.”

“You’re on,” Bender said, swiveling his head to give the wife a look, and then they were out of the Jeep and checking their weapons. Bender had a.470 Rigby elephant rifle and Bernard his Nitro — just in case the morning brought a reprise of the lion fiasco. The wife, who wasn’t doing any shooting, had brought along a video camera. Roland was back at the house with a truck, a chain saw and a crew of Mexicans to clean up the mess once the deed was done.

It was still early, and the heat hadn’t come up full yet — Bernard guessed it must have been eighty, eighty-five or so — but he was sweating already. He was always a little edgy on a hunt — especially with a clown like Bender twitching at his elbow, and most especially after what had happened with the lion. Bender was writhing and stamping up a storm, but his eyes were cool and focused as they strolled through the mesquite and tumbleweed and down into the ravine.

Bessie Bee was white with dust, flapping her ears and blowing up great clouds of it with her trunk. From a hundred yards you couldn’t see much more than flying dirt, as if a tornado had touched down; at fifty, the rucked and seamed head of the old elephant began to take on shape. Though there was little more risk involved than in potting a cow in its stall, Bernard was habitually cautious, and he stopped Bender there, at fifty yards. A pair of vultures drifted overhead, attracted by the Jeep, which they knew as the purveyor of bleeding flesh and carrion. The elephant sneezed. A crow called out somewhere behind them. “This is as far as we go,” Bernard said.

Bender gaped at him, popping his joints and bugging his eyes like a fraternity boy thwarted by the ID checker at the door of a bar full of sorority girls. “All I can see is dust,” he said.

Bernard was deep inside himself now. He checked the bolt on the big gun and flipped back the safety. “Just wait,” he said. “Find a spot — here, right here; you can use this rock to steady your aim — and just wait a minute, that’s all. She’ll tire of this in a minute or so, and when the dust settles you’ll have your shot.”

And so they crouched in the dirt, hunter and guide, and propped their guns up on a coarse red table of sandstone and waited for the dust to clear and the heat to rise and the vultures to sink down out of the sky in great ragged swoops.

For her part, Bessie Bee was more than a little suspicious. Though her eyes were poor, the Jeep was something she could see, and she could smell the hominids half a mile away. She should have been matriarch of a fine wild herd of elephants at Amboseli or Tsavo or the great Bahi swamp, but she’d lived all her fifty-two years on this strange and unnatural continent, amid the stink and confusion of man. She’d been goaded, beaten, tethered, taught to dance and stand on one leg and grasp the sorry wisp of a tail that hung from the sorry flanks of another sorry elephant like herself as they paraded before the teeming monkey masses in one forbidding arena after another. And then there was this, a place that stank of the oily secrets of the earth, and another tether and more men. She heard the thunder of the guns and she smelled the blood on the air and she knew they were killing. She knew, too, that the Jeep was there for her.

The dust settled round her, sifting down in a maelstrom of fine white motes. She flared her ears and trumpeted and lifted the standing timber of her right front foot from the ground and let it sway before her. She was tired of the goad, the tether, the brittle dry tasteless straw and cattle feed, tired of the sun and the air and the night and the morning: she charged.

She let her nose guide her till the guns crashed, once, twice, three times, and a new sort of goad tore into her, invasive and hot, but it just made her angry, made her come on all the harder, invincible, unstoppable, twelve feet at the shoulder and eight standing tons, no more circuses, no more palanquins, no more goads. And then she saw them, two pitiful sticklike figures springing up from behind a rock she could swallow and spit up three times over.

It wasn’t panic exactly, not at first. Bender shot wide, and the heavy shock of the gun seemed to stun him. Bessie Bee came straight for them, homing in on them, and Bernard bit down on his mustache and shouted, “Shoot! Shoot, you idiot!”

He got his wish. Bender fired again, finally, but all he managed to do was blow some hair off the thing’s back. Bernard stood then, the rifle to his shoulder, and though he remembered the lion and could already hear the nagging whining mealy-mouthed voice of Bender complaining over lunch of being denied this trophy too, the situation was critical; desperate, even — who would have thought it of Bessie Bee? — and he squeezed the trigger to the jerk and roar of the big gun.

Nothing. Had he missed? But then all at once he felt himself caught up in, a landslide, the rush of air, the reek of elephant, and he was flying, actually flying, high out over the plain and into the blue.

When he landed, he sat up and found that his shoulder had come loose from the socket and that there was some sort of fluid — blood, his own blood — obscuring the vision in his right eye. He was in shock, he told himself, repeating it aloud, over and over: “I’m in shock, I’m in shock.” Everything seemed hazy, and the arm didn’t hurt much, though it should have, nor the gash in his scalp either. But didn’t he have a gun? And where was it?

He looked up at the noise, a shriek of great conviction, and saw Bessie Bee rubbing her foot thoughtfully, almost tenderly, over Mike Bender’s prostrate form. Bender seemed to be naked — or no, he didn’t seem to be wearing any skin, either — and his head had been vastly transformed, so much more compact now. But there was something else going on too, something the insurance company wouldn’t be able to rectify, of that he was sure, if only in a vague way—“I’m in shock,” he repeated. This something was a shriek too, definitely human, but it rose and caught hold of the tail of the preceding shriek and climbed atop it, and before the vacuum of silence could close in there was another shriek, and another, until even the screams of the elephant were a whisper beside it.

It was Mrs. Bender, the wife, Nicole, one of the finest expressions of her species, and she was running from the Jeep and exercising her lungs. The Jeep seemed to be lying on its side — such an odd angle to see it from — and Mrs. Bender’s reedy form was in that moment engulfed by a moving wall of flesh, the big flanks blotting the scene from view, all that movement and weight closing out the little aria of screams with a final elephantine roll of the drums.

It might have been seconds later, or an hour — Bernard didn’t know. He sat there, an arm dangling from the shoulder, idly wiping the blood from his eye with his good hand while the naked black vultures drifted down on him with an air of professional interest. And then all at once, strange phenomenon, the sun was gone, and the vultures, and a great black shadow fell over him. He looked up dimly into the canvas of that colossal face framed in a riot of ears. “Bessie Bee?” he said. “Bessie Bee? Shamba?”

Half a mile away, fanned by the gentle breeze of the air conditioner, Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Bender, two months short of her thirteenth birthday and sated with chocolate and dreams of lean spike-haired adolescents with guitars and leather jackets, shifted her head on the pillow and opened her eyes. She was, in that waking moment, sole inheritor of the Bender real estate empire, and all the monies and houses and stocks and bonds and properties that accrued to it, not to mention the beach house and the Ferrari Testarossa, but she wasn’t yet aware of it. Something had awakened her, some ripple on the great pond of life. For just a moment there, over the drone of the air conditioner, she thought she’d heard a scream.

But no. It was probably just some peacock or baboon or whatever. Or that pitiful excuse for an elephant. She sat up, reached into her cooler for a root beer and shook her head. Tacky, she thought. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

(1990)

GREASY LAKE

There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parents’ whining station wagons out into the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read André Gide and struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake.

Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake. The Indians had called it Wakan, a reference to the clarity of its waters. Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the air force had strafed it. We went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich scent of possibility on the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets. This was nature.

I was there one night, late, in the company of two dangerous characters. Digby wore a gold star in his right ear and allowed his father to pay his tuition at Cornell; Jeff was thinking of quitting school to become a painter/musician/headshop proprietor. They were both expert in the social graces, quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick. They could lounge against a bank of booming speakers and trade “man”s with the best of them or roll out across the dance floor as if their joints worked on bearings. They were slick and quick and they wore their mirror shades at breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves. In short, they were bad.

I drove, Digby pounded the dashboard and shouted along with Toots & the Maytals while Jeff hung his head out the window and streaked the side of my mother’s Bel Air with vomit. It was early June, the air soft as a hand on your cheek, the third night of summer vacation. The first two nights we’d been out till dawn, looking for something we never found. On this, the third night, we’d cruised the strip sixty-seven times, been in and out of every bar and club we could think of in a twenty-mile radius, stopped twice for bucket chicken and forty-cent hamburgers, debated going to a party at the house of a girl Jeff’s sister knew, and chucked two dozen raw eggs at mailboxes and hitchhikers. It was 2:00 A.M.; the bars were closing. There was nothing to do but take a bottle of lemon-flavored gin up to Greasy Lake.

The taillights of a single car winked at us as we swung into the dirt lot with its tufts of weed and washboard corrugations; ‘57 Chevy, mint, metallic blue. On the far side of the lot, like the exoskeleton of some gaunt chrome insect, a chopper leaned against its kickstand. And that was it for excitement: some junkie half-wit biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend. Whatever it was we were looking for, we weren’t about to find it at Greasy Lake. Not that night.

But then all of a sudden Digby was fighting for the wheel.

“Hey, that’s Tony Lovett’s car! Hey!” he shouted, while I stabbed at the brake pedal and the Bel Air nosed up to the gleaming bumper of the parked Chevy. Digby leaned on the horn, laughing, and instructed me to put my brights on. I flicked on the brights. This was hilarious. A joke. Tony would experience premature withdrawal and expect to be confronted by grim-looking state troopers with flashlights. We hit the horn, strobed the lights, and then jumped out of the car to press our witty faces to Tony’s windows; for all we knew we might even catch a glimpse of some little fox’s tit, and then we could slap backs with red-faced Tony, roughhouse a little, and go on to new heights of adventure and daring.

The first mistake, the one that opened the whole floodgate, was losing my grip on the keys. In the excitement, leaping from the car with the gin in one hand and a roach clip in the other, I spilled them in the grass — in the dark, rank, mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake. This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland’s decision to dig in at Khe Sanh. I felt it like a jab of intuition, and I stopped there by the open door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet.

The second mistake — and this was inextricably bound up with the first — was identifying the car as Tony Lovett’s. Even before the very bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots ripped out of the driver’s door, I began to realize that this chrome blue was much lighter than the robin’s-egg of Tony’s car, and that Tony’s car didn’t have rear-mounted speakers. Judging from their expressions, Digby and Jeff were privately groping toward the same inevitable and unsettling conclusion as I was.

In any case, there was no reasoning with this bad greasy character — clearly he was a man of action. The first lusty Rockette’s kick of his steel-toed boot caught me under the chin, chipped my favorite tooth, and left me sprawled in the dirt. Like a fool, I’d gone down on one knee to comb the stiff hacked grass for the keys, my mind making connections in the most dragged-out, testudineous way, knowing that things had gone wrong, that I was in a lot of trouble, and that the lost ignition key was my grail and my salvation. The three or four succeeding blows were mainly absorbed by my right buttock and the tough piece of bone at the base of my spine.

Meanwhile, Digby vaulted the kissing bumpers and delivered a savage kung-fu blow to the greasy character’s collarbone. Digby had just finished a course in martial arts for phys-ed credit and had spent the better part of the past two nights telling us apocryphal tales of Bruce Lee types and of the raw power invested in lightning blows shot from coiled wrists, ankles and elbows. The greasy character was unimpressed. He merely backed off a step, his face like a Toltec mask, and laid Digby out with a single whistling roundhouse blow … but by now Jeff had got into the act, and I was beginning to extricate myself from the dirt, a tinny compound of shock, rage, and impotence wadded in my throat.

Jeff was on the guy’s back, biting at his ear. Digby was on the ground, cursing. I went for the tire iron I kept under the driver’s seat. I kept it there because bad characters always keep tire irons under the driver’s seat, for just such an occasion as this. Never mind that I hadn’t been involved in a fight since sixth grade, when a kid with a sleepy eye and two streams of mucus depending from his nostrils hit me in the knee with a Louisville slugger; never mind that I’d touched the tire iron exactly twice before, to change tires: it was there. And I went for it.

I was terrified. Blood was beating in my ears, my hands were shaking, my heart turning over like a dirtbike in the wrong gear. My antagonist was shirtless, and a single cord of muscle flashed across his chest as he bent forward to peel Jeff from his back like a wet overcoat. “Motherfucker,” he spat, over and over, and I was aware in that instant that all four of us — Digby, Jeff, and myself included — were chanting “motherfucker, motherfucker,” as if it were a battle cry. (What happened next? the detective asks the murderer from beneath the turned-down brim of his porkpie hat. I don’t know, the murderer says, something came over me. Exactly.)

Digby poked the flat of his hand in the bad character’s face and I came at him like a kamikaze, mindless, raging, stung with humiliation — the whole thing, from the initial boot in the chin to this murderous primal instant involving no more than sixty hyperventilating, gland-flooding seconds — and I came at him and brought the tire iron down across his ear. The effect was instantaneous, astonishing. He was a stunt man and this was Hollywood, he was a big grimacing toothy balloon and I was a man with a straight pin. He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots.

A single second, big as a zeppelin, floated by. We were standing over him in a circle, gritting our teeth, jerking our necks, our limbs and hands and feet twitching with glandular discharges. No one said anything. We just stared down at the guy, the car freak, the lover, the bad greasy character laid low. Digby looked at me; so did Jeff. I was still holding the tire iron, a tuft of hair clinging to the crook like dandelion fluff, like down. Rattled, I dropped it in the dirt, already envisioning the headlines, the pitted faces of the police inquisitors, the gleam of handcuffs, clank of bars, the big black shadows rising from the back of the cell … when suddenly a raw torn shriek cut through me like all the juice in all the electric chairs in the country.

It was the fox. She was short, barefoot, dressed in panties and a man’s shirt. “Animals!” she screamed, running at us with her fists clenched and wisps of blow-dried hair in her face. There was a silver chain round her ankle, and her toenails flashed in the glare of the headlights. I think it was the toenails that did it. Sure, the gin and the cannabis and even the Kentucky Fried may have had a hand in it, but it was the sight of those flaming toes that set us off — the toad emerging from the loaf in Virgin Spring, lipstick smeared on a child: she was already tainted. We were on her like Bergman’s deranged brothers — see no evil, hear none, speak none — panting, wheezing, tearing at her clothes, grabbing for flesh. We were bad characters, and we were scared and hot and three steps over the line — anything could have happened.

It didn’t.

Before we could pin her to the hood of the car, our eyes masked with lust and greed and the purest primal badness, a pair of headlights swung into the lot. There we were, dirty, bloody, guilty, dissociated from humanity and civilization, the first of the Ur-crimes behind us, the second in progress, shreds of nylon panty and spandex brassiere dangling from our fingers, our flies open, lips licked — there we were, caught in the spotlight. Nailed.

We bolted. First for the car, and then, realizing we had no way of starting it, for the woods. I thought nothing. I thought escape. The headlights came at me like accusing fingers. I was gone.

Ram-bam-bam, across the parking lot, past the chopper and into the feculent undergrowth at the lake’s edge, insects flying up in my face, weeds whipping, frogs and snakes and red-eyed turtles splashing off into the night: I was already ankle-deep in muck and tepid water and still going strong. Behind me, the girl’s screams rose in intensity, disconsolate, incriminating, the screams of the Sabine women, the Christian martyrs, Anne Frank dragged from the garret. I kept going, pursued by those cries, imagining cops and bloodhounds. The water was up to my knees when I realized what I was doing: I was going to swim for it. Swim the breadth of Greasy Lake and hide myself in the thick clot of woods on the far side. They’d never find me there.

I was breathing in sobs, in gasps. The water lapped at my waist as I looked out over the moon-burnished ripples, the mats of algae that clung to the surface like scabs. Digby and Jeff had vanished. I paused. Listened. The girl was quieter now, screams tapering to sobs, but there were male voices, angry, excited, and the high-pitched ticking of the second car’s engine. I waded deeper, stealthy, hunted, the ooze sucking at my sneakers. As I was about to take the plunge — at the very instant I dropped my shoulder for the first slashing stroke — I blundered into something. Something unspeakable, obscene, something soft, wet, moss-grown. A patch of weed? A log? When I reached out to touch it, it gave like a rubber duck, it gave like flesh.

In one of those nasty little epiphanies for which we are prepared by films and TV and childhood visits to the funeral home to ponder the shrunken painted forms of dead grandparents, I understood what it was that bobbed there so inad-missibly in the dark. Understood, and stumbled back in horror and revulsion, my mind yanked in six different directions (I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second), thinking, The keys, the keys, why did I have to go and lose the keys? I stumbled back, but the muck took hold of my feet — a sneaker snagged, balance lost — and suddenly I was pitching face forward into the buoyant black mass, throwing out my hands in desperation while simultaneously conjuring the image of reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescing juices. AAAAArrrgh! I shot from the water like a torpedo, the dead man rotating to expose a mossy beard and eyes cold as the moon. I must have shouted out, thrashing around in the weeds, because the voices behind me suddenly became animated.

“What was that?”

“It’s them, it’s them: they tried to, tried to … rape me!” Sobs.

A man’s voice, flat, Midwestern accent. “You sons a bitches, we’ll kill you!”

Frogs, crickets.

Then another voice, harsh, r-less, Lower East Side: “Motherfucker!” I recognized the verbal virtuosity of the bad greasy character in the engineer boots. Tooth chipped, sneakers gone, coated in mud and slime and worse, crouching breathless in the weeds waiting to have my ass thoroughly and definitively kicked and fresh from the hideous stinking embrace of a three-days-dead-corpse, I suddenly felt a rush of joy and vindication: the son of a bitch was alive! Just as quickly, my bowels turned to ice. “Come on out of there, you pansy motherfuckers!” the bad greasy character was screaming. He shouted curses till he was out of breath.

The crickets started up again, then the frogs. I held my breath. All at once there was a sound in the reeds, a swishing, a splash: thunk-a-thunk. They were throwing rocks. The frogs fell silent. I cradled my head. Swish, swish, thunk-a-thunk. A wedge of feldspar the size of a cue ball glanced off my knee. I bit my finger.

It was then that they turned to the car. I heard a door slam, a curse, and then the sound of the headlights shattering — almost a good-natured sound, celebratory, like corks popping from the necks of bottles. This was succeeded by the dull booming of the fenders, metal on metal, and then the icy crash of the windshield. I inched forward, elbows and knees, my belly pressed to the muck, thinking of guerrillas and commandos and The Naked and the Dead. I parted the weeds and squinted the length of the parking lot.

The second car — it was a Trans-Am — was still running, its high beams washing the scene in a lurid stagy light. Tire iron flailing, the greasy bad character was laying into the side of my mother’s Bel Air like an avenging demon, his shadow riding up the trunks of the trees. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp-whomp. The other two guys — blond types, in fraternity jackets — were helping out with tree branches and skull-sized boulders. One of them was gathering up bottles, rocks, muck, candy wrappers, used condoms, poptops, and other refuse and pitching it through the window on the driver’s side. I could see the fox, a white bulb behind the windshield of the ‘57 Chevy. “Bobbie,” she whined over the thumping, “come on.” The greasy character paused a moment, took one good swipe at the left taillight, and then heaved the tire iron halfway across the lake. Then he fired up the ‘57 and was gone.

Blond head nodded at blond head. One said something to the other, too low for me to catch. They were no doubt thinking that in helping to annihilate my mother’s car they’d committed a fairly rash act, and thinking too that there were three bad characters connected with that very car watching them from the woods. Perhaps other possibilities occurred to them as well — police, jail cells, justices of the peace, reparations, lawyers, irate parents, fraternal censure. Whatever they were thinking, they suddenly dropped branches, bottles, and rocks and sprang for their car in unison, as if they’d choreographed it. Five seconds. That’s all it took. The engine shrieked, the tires squealed, a cloud of dust rose from the rutted lot and then settled back on darkness.

I don’t know how long I lay there, the bad breath of decay all around me, my jacket heavy as a bear, the primordial ooze subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate my upper thighs and testicles. My jaws ached, my knee throbbed, my coccyx was on fire. I contemplated suicide, wondered if I’d need bridgework, scraped the recesses of my brain for some sort of excuse to give my parents — a tree had fallen on the car, I was blindsided by a bread truck, hit and run, vandals had got to it while we were playing chess at Digby’s. Then I thought of the dead man. He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I was: I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back. The owner of the chopper, no doubt, a bad older character come to this. Shot during a murky drug deal, drowned while drunkenly frolicking in the lake. Another headline. My car was wrecked; he was dead.

When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.

I was circling the car, as dazed and bedraggled as the sole survivor of an air blitz, when Digby and Jeff emerged from the trees behind me. Digby’s face was crosshatched with smears of dirt; Jeff’s jacket was gone and his shirt was torn across the shoulder. They slouched across the lot, looking sheepish, and silently came up beside me to gape at the ravaged automobile. No one said a word. After a while Jeff swung open the driver’s door and began to scoop the broken glass and garbage off the seat. I looked at Digby. He shrugged. “At least they didn’t slash the tires,” he said.

It was true: the tires were intact. There was no windshield, the headlights were staved in, and the body looked as if it had been sledge-hammered for a quarter a shot at the county fair, but the tires were inflated to regulation pressure. The car was drivable. In silence, all three of us bent to scrape the mud and shattered glass from the interior. I said nothing about the biker. When we were finished, I reached in my pocket for the keys, experienced a nasty stab of recollection, cursed myself, and turned to search the grass. I spotted them almost immediately, no more than five feet from the open door, glinting like jewels in the first tapering shaft of sunlight. There was no reason to get philosophical about it: I eased into the seat and turned the engine over.

It was at that precise moment that the silver Mustang with the flame decals rumbled into the lot. All three of us froze; then Digby and Jeff slid into the car and slammed the door. We watched as the Mustang rocked and bobbed across the ruts and finally jerked to a halt beside the forlorn chopper at the far end of the lot. “Let’s go,” Digby said. I hesitated, the Bel Air wheezing beneath me.

Two girls emerged from the Mustang. Tight jeans, stiletto heels, hair like frozen fur. They bent over the motorcycle, paced back and forth aimlessly, glanced once or twice at us, and then ambled over to where the reeds sprang up in a green fence round the perimeter of the lake. One of them cupped her hands to her mouth. “Al,” she called. “Hey, Al!”

“Come on,” Digby hissed. “Let’s get out of here.”

But it was too late. The second girl was picking her way across the lot, unsteady on her heels, looking up at us and then away. She was older — twenty-five or — six — and as she came closer we could see there was something wrong with her: she was stoned or drunk, lurching now and waving her arms for balance. I gripped the steering wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet, and Digby spat out my name, twice, terse and impatient.

“Hi,” the girl said.

We looked at her like zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.

She smiled, her lips cracked and dry. “Listen,” she said, bending from the waist to look in the window, “you guys seen Al?” Her pupils were pinpoints, her eyes glass. She jerked her neck. “That’s his bike over there — Al’s. You seen him?”

Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed. Digby poked me in the ribs. “We haven’t seen anybody,” I said.

The girl seemed to consider this, reaching out a slim veiny arm to brace herself against the car. “No matter,” she said, slurring the t’s, “he’ll turn up.” And then, as if she’d just taken stock of the whole scene — the ravaged car and our battered faces, the desolation of the place — she said: “Hey, you guys look like some pretty bad characters — been fightin’, huh?” We stared straight ahead, rigid as catatonics. She was fumbling in her pocket and muttering something. Finally she held out a handful of tablets in glassine wrappers: “Hey, you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah?”

I just looked at her. I thought I was going to cry. Digby broke the silence. “No thanks,” he said, leaning over me. “Some other time.”

I put the car in gear and it inched forward with a groan, shaking off pellets of glass like an old dog shedding water after a bath, heaving over the ruts on its worn springs, creeping toward the highway. There was a sheen of sun on the lake. I looked back. The girl was still standing there, watching us, her shoulders slumped, hand outstretched.

(1981)

PEACE OF MIND

First she told them the story of the family surprised over their corn muffins by the masked intruder. “He was a black man,” she said, dropping her voice and at the same time allowing a hint of tremolo to creep into it, “and he was wearing a lifelike mask of President Reagan. He just jimmied the lock and waltzed in the front door with the morning paper as if he was delivering flowers or something…. They thought it was a joke at first.” Giselle’s voice became hushed now, confidential, as she described how he’d brutalized the children, humiliated the wife—“Sexually, if you know what I mean”—and bound them all to the kitchen chair with twists of sheer pantyhose. Worse, she said, he drug a scratchy old copy of Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” out of the record collection and made them listen to it over and over as he looted the house. They knew he was finished when Sam and Dave choked off, the stereo rudely torn from the socket and thrown in with the rest of their things — she paused here to draw a calculated breath—“And at seven-thirty A.M., no less.”

She had them, she could see it in the way the pretty little wife’s eyes went dark with hate and the balding husband clutched fitfully at his pockets — she had them, but she poured it on anyway, flexing her verbal muscles, not yet noon and a sale, a big sale, already in the bag. So she gave them an abbreviated version of the story of the elderly lady and the overworked Mexican from the knife-sharpening service and wrung some hideous new truths from the tale of the housewife who came home to find a strange car in her garage. “A strange car?” the husband prompted, after she’d paused to level a doleful, frightened look on the wife. Giselle sighed. “Two white men met her at the door. They were in their early forties, nicely dressed, polite — she thought they were real-estate people or something. They escorted her into the house, bundled up the rugs, the paintings, the Camcorder and VCR and then took turns desecrating”—that was the term she used, it got them every time—“desecrating her naked body with the cigarette lighter from her very own car.”

The husband and wife exchanged a glance, then signed on for the whole shmeer — five thousand and some-odd dollars for the alarm system — every window, door, keyhole, and crevice wired — and sixty bucks a month for a pair of “Armed Response” signs to stick in the lawn. Giselle slid into the front seat of the Mercedes and cranked up the salsa music that made her feel as if every day was a fiesta, and then let out a long slow breath. She checked her watch and drew a circle around the next name on her list. It was a few minutes past twelve, crime was rampant, and she was feeling lucky. She tapped her foot and whistled along with the sour, jostling trumpets — no doubt about it, she’d have another sale before lunch.

The balding husband stood at the window and watched the Mercedes back out of the driveway, drift into gear, and glide soundlessly up the street. It took him a moment to realize he was still clutching his checkbook. “God, Hil,” he said (or, rather, croaked — something seemed to be wrong with his throat), “it’s a lot of money.”

The pretty little wife, Hilary, crouched frozen on the couch, legs drawn up to her chest, feet bare, toenails glistening. “They stuff your underwear in your mouth,” she whispered, “that’s the worst thing. Can you imagine that, I mean the taste of it — your own underwear?”

Ellis didn’t answer. He was thinking of the masked intruder — the maniac disguised as the President — and of his own children, whose heedless squeals of joy came to him like hosannas from the swingset out back. He’d been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they’d be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you worked for, everything you loved, had to be locked up as if you were in a castle under siege.

“I wonder what they did to her,” Hilary said.

“Who?”

“The woman — the one with the cigarette lighter. I heard they burn their initials into you.”

Yes, of course they did, he thought — why wouldn’t they? They sold crack in the elementary schools, pissed in the alleys, battered old women for their Social Security checks. They’d cleaned out Denny Davidson while he was in the Bahamas and ripped the stereo out of Phyllis Steubig’s Peugeot. And just last week they’d stolen two brand-new Ironcast aluminum garbage cans from the curb in front of the neighbors’ house — just dumped the trash in the street and drove off with them. “What do you think, Hil?” he said. “We can still get out of it.”

“I don’t care what it costs,” she murmured, her voice drained of emotion. “I won’t be able to sleep till it’s in.”

Ellis crossed the room to gaze out on the sun-dappled backyard. Mifty and Corinne were on the swings, pumping hard, lifting up into the sky and falling back again with a pure rhythmic grace that was suddenly so poignant he could feel a sob rising in his throat. “I won’t either,” he said, turning to his wife and spreading his hands as if in supplication. “We’ve got to have it.”

“Yes,” she said.

“If only for our peace of mind.”

Giselle was pretty good with directions — she had to be, in her business — but still she had to pull over three times to consult her Thomas’ Guide before she found the next address on her list. The house was in a seedy, run-down neighborhood of blasted trees, gutted cars, and tacky little houses, the kind of neighborhood that just made her blood boil — how could people live like that? she wondered, flicking off the tape in disgust. Didn’t they have any self-respect? She hit the accelerator, scattering a pack of snarling, hyenalike dogs, dodged a stained mattress and a pair of overturned trash cans and swung into the driveway of a house that looked as if it had been bombed, partially reconstructed, and then bombed again. There has to be some mistake, she thought. She glanced up and caught the eye of the man sitting on the porch next door. He was fat and shirtless, his chest and arms emblazoned with lurid tattoos, and he was in the act of lifting a beer can to his lips when he saw that she was peering at him from behind the frosted window of her car. Slowly, as if it cost him an enormous effort, he lowered the beer can and raised the middle finger of his free hand.

She rechecked her list. 7718 Picador Drive. There was no number on the house in front of her, but the house to the left was 7716 and the one to the right 7720. This was it, all right. She stepped out of the car with her briefcase, squared her shoulders, and slammed the door, all the while wondering what in god’s name the owner of a place like this would want with an alarm system. These were the sort of people who broke into houses — and here she turned to give the fat man an icy glare — not the ones who had anything to protect. But then what did she care? — a sale was a sale. She set the car alarm with a fierce snap of her wrist, waited for the reassuring bleat of response from the bowels of the car, and marched up the walk.

The man who answered the door was tall and stooped — mid-fifties, she guessed — and he looked like a scholar in his wire-rims and the dingy cardigan with the leather elbow patches. His hair was the color of freshly turned dirt and his eyes, slightly distorted and swimming behind the thick lenses, were as blue as the skies over Oklahoma. “Mr. Coles?” she said.

He looked her up and down, taking his time. “And what’re you supposed to be,” he breathed in a wheezy humorless drawl, “the Avon Lady or something?” It was then that she noticed the nervous little woman frozen in the shadows of the hallway behind him. “Everett,” the woman said in a soft, pleading tone, but the man took no notice of her. “Or don’t tell me,” he said, “you’re selling Girl Scout cookies, right?”

When it came to sales, Giselle was unshakable. She saw her opening and thrust out her hand. “Giselle Nyerges,” she said, “I’m from SecureCo? You contacted us about a home security system?”

The woman vanished. The fat man next door blew into his fist and produced a rude noise and Everett Coles, with a grin that showed too much gum, took her hand and led her into the house.

Inside, the place wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. Kmart taste, of course, furniture made of particle board, hopelessly tacky bric-a-brac, needlepoint homilies on the walls, but at least it was spare. And clean. The man led her through the living room to the open-beam kitchen and threw himself down in a chair at the Formica table. A sliding glass door gave onto the dusty expanse of the backyard. “So,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

“First I want to tell you how happy I am that you’re considering a SecureCo home security system, Mr. Coles,” she said, sitting opposite him and throwing the latches on her briefcase with a professional snap. “I don’t know if you heard about it,” she said, the conspiratorial whisper creeping into her voice, “but just last week they found a couple — both retirees, on a fixed income — bludgeoned to death in their home not three blocks from here. And they’d been security-conscious too — deadbolts on the doors and safety locks on the windows. The killer was this black man — a Negro — and he was wearing a lifelike mask of President Reagan … Well, he found this croquet mallet …”

She faltered. The man was looking at her in the oddest way. Really, he was. He was grinning still — grinning as if she were telling a joke — and there was something wrong with his eyes. They seemed to be jerking back and forth in the sockets, jittering like the shiny little balls in a pinball machine. “I know it’s not a pleasant story, Mr. Coles,” she said, “but I like my customers to know that, that …” Those eyes were driving her crazy. She looked down, shuffling through the papers in her briefcase.

“They crowd you,” he said.

“Pardon?” Looking up again.

“Sons of bitches,” he growled, “they crowd you.”

She found herself gazing over his shoulder at the neat little needlepoint display on the kitchen wall: SEMPER FIDELIS; HOME SWEET HOME; BURN, BABY, BURN.

“You like?” he said.

Burn, Baby, Burn?

“Did them myself.” He dropped the grin and gazed out on nothing. “Got a lot of time on my hands.”

She felt herself slipping. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go at all. She was wondering if she should hit him with another horror story or get down to inspecting the house and writing up an estimate, when he asked if she wanted a drink.

“Thank you, no,” she said. And then, with a smile, “It’s a bit early in the day for me.”

He said nothing, just looked at her with those jumpy blue eyes till she had to turn away. “Shit,” he spat suddenly, “come down off your high horse, lady, let your hair down, loosen up.”

She cleared her throat. “Yes, well, shouldn’t we have a look around so I can assess your needs?”

“Gin,” he said, and his voice was flat and calm again, “it’s the elixir of life.” He made no move to get up from the table. “You’re a good-looking woman, you know that?”

“Thank you,” she said in her smallest voice. “Shouldn’t we—?”

“Got them high heels and pretty little ankles, nice earrings, hair all done up, and that smart little tweed suit — of course you know you’re a good-looking woman. Bet it don’t hurt the sales a bit, huh?”

She couldn’t help herself now. All she wanted was to get up from the table and away from those jittery eyes, sale or no sale. “Listen,” she said, “listen to me. There was this woman and she came home and there was this strange car in her garage—”

“No,” he said, “you listen to me.”

“’Panty Rapist Escapes,’” Hilary read aloud in a clear declamatory tone, setting down her coffee mug and spreading out the “Metro” section as if it were a sacred text. “‘Norbert Baptiste, twenty-seven, of Silverlake, dubbed the Panty Rapist because he gagged his victims with their own underthings …’” She broke off to give her husband a look of muted triumph. “You see,” she said, lifting the coffee mug to her lips, “I told you. With their own underthings.“

Ellis Hunsicker was puzzling over the box scores of the previous night’s ball-games, secure as a snail in its shell. It was early Saturday morning, Mifty and Corinne were in the den watching cartoons, and the house alarm was still set from the previous night. In a while, after he’d finished his muesli and his second cup of coffee, he’d punch in the code and disarm the thing and then maybe do a little gardening and afterward take the girls to the park. He wasn’t really listening, and he murmured a halfhearted reply.

“And can you imagine Tina Carfarct trying to tell me we were just wasting our money on the alarm system?” She pinched her voice in mockery: “’I hate to tell you, Hil, but this is the safest neighborhood in L.A.’ Jesus, she’s like a Pollyanna or something, but you know what it is, don’t you?”

Ellis looked up from the paper.

“They’re too cheap, that’s what — her and Sid both. They’re going to take their chances, hope it happens to the next guy, and all to save a few thousand dollars. It’s sick. It really is.”

Night before last they’d had the Carfarcts and their twelve-year-old boy, Brewster, over for dinner — a nice sole amandine and scalloped potatoes Ellis had whipped up himself — and the chief object of conversation was, of course, the alarm system. “I don’t know,” Sid had said (Sid was forty, handsome as a prince, an investment counselor who’d once taught high-school social studies), “it’s kind of like being a prisoner in your own home.”

“All that money,” Tina chimed in, sucking at the cherry of her second Manhattan, “I mean I don’t think I could stand it. Like Sid says, I’d feel like I was a prisoner or something, afraid to step out into my own yard because some phantom mugger might be lurking in the marigolds.”

“The guy in the Reagan mask was no phantom,” Hilary said, leaning across the table to slash the air with the flat of her hand, bracelets ajangle. “Or those two men—white men — who accosted that woman in her own garage—” She was so wrought up she couldn’t go on. She turned to her husband, tears welling in her eyes. “Go on,” she’d said, “tell them.”

It was then that Tina had made her “safest neighborhood in L.A.” remark and Sid, draining his glass and setting it down carefully on the table, had said in a phlegmy, ruminative voice, “I don’t know, it’s like you’ve got no faith in your fellow man,” to which Ellis had snapped, “Don’t be naive, Sid.”

Even Tina scored him for that one. “Oh, come off it, Sid,” she said, giving him a sour look.

“Let’s face it,” Ellis said, “it’s a society of haves and have-nots, and like it or not, we’re the haves.”

“I don’t deny there’s a lot of crazies out there and all,” Tina went on, swiveling to face Ellis, “it’s just that the whole idea of having an alarm on everything — I mean you can’t park your car at the mall without it — is just, well, it’s a sad thing. I mean next thing you know people’ll be wearing these body alarms to work, rub up against them in a crowd and — bingo! — lights flash and sirens go off.” She sat back, pleased with herself, a tiny, elegant blonde in a low-cut cocktail dress and a smug grin, untouched, unafraid, a woman without a care in the world.

But then Sid wanted to see the thing and all four of them were at the front door, gathered round the glowing black plastic panel as if it were some rare jewel, some treasure built into the wall. Ellis was opening the closet to show them the big metal box that contained the system’s “brain,” as the SecureCo woman had called it, when Sid, taken by the allure of the thing, lightly touched the tip of his index finger to the neat glowing red strip at the bottom that read EMERGENCY.

Instantly, the scene was transformed. Whereas a moment earlier they’d been calm, civilized people having a drink before a calm, civilized meal, they were suddenly transformed into hand-wringing zombies, helpless in the face of the technology that assaulted them. For Sid had activated the alarm and no one, least of all Ellis, knew what to do about it. The EMERGENCY strip was flashing wildly, the alarm beep-beep-beeping, the girls and the Carfarcts’ boy fleeing the TV room in confusion, four pairs of hands fluttering helplessly over the box, and Ellis trying to dredge up the disarm code from the uncertain pocket of memory in which it was stored. “One-two-two-one!” Hilary shouted. Tina was holding her ears and making a face. Sid looked abashed.

When at last — after two false starts — Ellis had succeeded in disarming the thing and they’d settled back with their drinks and exclamations of “Jesus!” and “I thought I was going to die,” there was a knock at the door. It was a man in a SecureCo uniform, with nightstick and gun. He was tall and he had a mustache. He invited himself in. “There a problem?” he asked.

“No, no,” Ellis said, standing in the entranceway, heart pounding, acutely aware of his guests’ eyes on him, “it’s a new system and we, uh — it was a mistake.”

“Name?” the man said.

“Hunsicker. Ellis.”

“Code word?”

Here Ellis faltered. The code word, to be used for purposes of positive identification in just such a situation as this, was Hilary’s inspiration. Pick something easy to remember, the SecureCo woman had said, and Hilary had chosen the name of the kids’ pet rabbit, Honey Bunny. Ellis couldn’t say the words. Not in front of this humorless man in the mustache, not with Sid and Tina watching him with those tight mocking smiles on their lips …

“Code word?” the man repeated.

Hilary was sunk into the couch at the far end of the coffee table. She leaned forward and raised her hand like a child in class, waving it to catch the guard’s attention. “Honey Bunny,” she said in a gasp that made the hair prickle at the back of Ellis’ neck, “it’s Honey Bunny.”

That had been two nights ago.

But now, in the clear light of Saturday morning, after sleeping the sleep of the just — and prudent (Panty Rapist — all the Panty Rapists in the world could escape and it was nothing to him) — feeling self-satisfied and content right on down to the felt lining of his slippers, Ellis sat back, stretched, and gave his wife a rich little smile. “I guess it’s a matter of priorities, honey,” he said. “Sid and Tina can think what they want, but you know what I say — better safe than sorry.”

When she talked about it afterward — with her husband at Gennaro’s that night (she was too upset to cook), with her sister, with Betty Berger on the telephone — Giselle said she’d never been so scared in all her life. She meant it too. This was no horror story clipped from the newspaper, this was real. And it happened to her.

The guy was crazy. Creepy. Sick. He’d kept her there over four hours, and he had no intention of buying anything — she could see that in the first fifteen minutes. He just wanted an audience. Somebody to rant at, to threaten, to pin down with those jittery blue eyes. Richard had wanted her to go to the police, but she balked. What had he done, really? Scared her, yes. Bruised her arm. But what could the police do — she’d gone there of her own free will.

Her own free will. He’d said that. Those were his exact words.

Indignant, maybe a little shaken, she’d got up from the kitchen table to stuff her papers back into the briefcase. He was cursing under his breath, muttering darkly about the idiots on the freeway in their big-ass Mercedeses, crowding him, about spics and niggers and junior-high kids cutting through his yard—“Free country, my ass!” he’d shouted suddenly. “Free for every punk and weirdo and greaser to crap all over what little bit I got left, but let me get up from this table and put a couple holes in one of the little peckerheads and we’ll see how it is. And I suppose you’re going to protect me, huh, Miss Mercedes Benz with your heels and stockings and your big high-tech alarm system, huh?”

When she snapped the briefcase closed — no sale, nothing, just get me out of here, she was thinking — that was when he grabbed her arm. “Sit down,” he snarled, and she tried to shake free but couldn’t, he was strong with the rage of the psychopath, the lion in its den, the loony up against the wall.

“You’re hurting me,” she said as he forced her back down. “Mr…. Coles!” and she heard her own voice jump with anger, fright, pain.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, tightening his grip, “but you came here of your own free will, didn’t you? Thought you were going to sucker me, huh? Run me a song and dance and lay your high-tech crap and your big bad SecureCo guards on me — oh, I’ve seen them, bunch of titsuckers and college wimps, who they going to stop? Huh?” He dropped her arm and challenged her with his jumpy mad tight-jawed glare.

She tried to get up but he roared, “Sit down! We got business here, goddamnit!” And then he was calling for his wife: “Glenys! Woman! Get your ass in here.”

If she’d expected anything from the wife, any help or melioration, Giselle could see at a glance just how hopeless it was. The woman wouldn’t look at her. She appeared in the doorway, pale as death, her hands trembling, staring at the carpet like a whipped dog. “Two G&T’s,” Coles said, sucking in his breath as if he were on the very edge of something, at the very beginning, “tall with a wedge of lime.”

“But—” Giselle began to protest, looking from Coles to the woman.

“You’ll drink with me, all right.” Coles’ voice came at her like a blade of ice. “Get friendly, huh? Show me what you got.” And then he turned away, his face violent with disgust. “SecureCo,” he spat. He looked up, staring past her. “You going to keep the sons of bitches away from me, you going to keep them off my back, you going to give me any guarantees?” His voice rose. “I got a gun collection worth twelve thousand dollars in there — you going to answer for that? For my color TV? The goddamned trash can even?”

Giselle sat rigid, wondering if she could make a break for the back door and wondering if he was the type to keep it locked.

“Sell me,” he demanded, looking at her now.

The woman set down the gin-and tonics and then faded back into the shadows of the hallway. Giselle said nothing.

“Tell me about the man in the mask,” he said, grinning again, grinning wide, too wide, “tell me about those poor old retired people. Come on,” he said, his eyes taunting her, “sell me. I want it. I do. I mean I really need you people and your high-tech bullshit….”

He held her eyes, gulped half his drink, and set the glass down again. “I mean really,” he said. “For my peace of mind.”

It wasn’t the fender-bender on the freeway the night before or the two hundred illegals lined up and looking for work on Canoga Avenue at dawn, and it wasn’t the heart-clenching hate he still felt after being forced into early retirement two years ago or the fact that he’d sat up all night drinking gin while Glenys slept and the police and insurance companies filed their reports — it wasn’t any of that that finally drove Everett Coles over the line. Not that he’d admit, anyway. It wasn’t that little whore from SecureCo either (that’s what she was, a whore, selling her tits and her lips and her ankles and all the rest of it too) or the veiny old hag from Westec or even the self-satisfied, smirking son of a bitch from Metropolitan Life, though he’d felt himself slipping on that one (“Death and dismemberment!” he’d hooted in the man’s face, so thoroughly irritated, rubbed wrong, and just plain pissed he could think of nothing but the big glistening Mannlicher on the wall in the den) … No, it was Rance Ruby’s stupid, fat-faced, shit-licking excuse of a kid.

Picture him sitting there in the first faint glow of early morning, the bottle mostly gone now and the fire in his guts over that moron with the barking face who’d run into him on the freeway just about put out, and then he looks up from the kitchen table and what does he see but this sorry lardassed spawn of a sorry tattooed beer-swilling lardass of a father cutting through the yard with his black death’s-head T-shirt and his looseleaf and book jackets, and that’s it. There’s no more thinking, no more reason, no insurance or hope. He’s up out of the chair like a shot and into the den, and then he’s punching the barrel of the Mannlicher right through the glass of the den window. The fat little fuck, he’s out there under the grapefruit tree, shirttail hanging out, turning at the sound, and then ka-boom, there’s about half of him left.

Next minute Everett Coles is in his car, fender rubbing against the tire in back where that sorry sack of shit ran into him, and slamming out of the driveway. He’s got the Mannlicher on the seat beside him and a couple fistfuls of ammunition and he’s peppering the side of Ruby’s turd-colored house with a blast from his Weatherby pump-action shotgun. He grazes a parked camper on his way up the block, slams over a couple of garbage cans, and leans out the window to take the head off somebody’s yapping poodle as he careens out onto the boulevard, every wire gone loose in his head.

Ellis Hunsicker woke early. He’d dreamt he was a little cloud — the little cloud of the bedtime story he’d read Mifty and Corinne the night before — scudding along in the vast blue sky, free and untethered, the sun smiling on him as it does in picturebooks, when all at once he’d felt himself swept irresistibly forward, moving faster and faster, caught up in a huge, darkening, malevolent thunderhead that rose up faceless from the far side of the day … and then he woke. It was just first light. Hilary was breathing gently beside him. The alarm panel glowed soothingly in the shadow of the half-open door.

It was funny how quickly he’d got used to the thing, he reflected, yawning and scratching himself there in the muted light. A week ago he’d made a fool of himself over it in front of Sid and Tina, and now it was just another appliance, no more threatening or unusual — and no less vital — than the microwave, the Cuisinart, or the clock radio. The last two mornings, in fact, he’d been awakened not by the clock radio but by the insistent beeping of the house alarm — Mifty had set it off going out the back door to cuddle her rabbit. He thought now of getting up to shut the thing off — it was an hour yet before he’d have to be up for work — but he didn’t. The bed was warm, the birds had begun to whisper outside, and he shut his eyes, drifting off like a little cloud.

When he woke again it was to the beep-beep-beep of the house alarm and to the hazy apprehension of some godawful crash — a jet breaking the sound barrier, the first rumbling clap of the quake he lived in constant fear of — an apprehension that something was amiss, that this beep-beep-beeping, familiar though it seemed, was somehow different, more high-pitched and admonitory than the beep-beep-beeping occasioned by a child going out to cuddle a bunny. He sat up. Hilary rose to her elbows beside him, looking bewildered, and in that instant the alarm was silenced forever by the unmistakable roar of gunblast. Ellis’ heart froze. Hilary cried out, there was the heavy thump of footsteps below, a faint choked whimper as of little girls startled in their sleep and then a strange voice — high, hoarse, and raging — that chewed up the morning like a set of jaws. “Armed response!” the voice howled. “Armed response, goddamnk! Armed response!”

The couple strained forward like mourners at a funeral. Giselle had them, she knew that. They’d looked scared when she came to the door, a pair of timid rabbity faces peering out at her from behind the matching frames of their prescription glasses, and they seated themselves on the edge of the couch as if they were afraid of their own furniture. She had them wringing their hands and darting uneasy glances out the window as she described the perpetrator—“A white man, dressed like a schoolteacher, but with these wicked, jittery eyes that just sent a shiver through you.” She focused on the woman as she described the victims. There was a boy, just fourteen years old, on his way to school, and a woman in a Mercedes driving down to the corner store for coffee filters. And then the family — they must have read about it — all of them, not three blocks from where they were now sitting. “He was thirty-five years old,” she said in a husky voice, “an engineer at Rocketdyne, his whole life ahead of him … arid she, she was one of these supernice people who … and the children …” She couldn’t go on. The man — Mr. Dunsinane, wasn’t that the name? — leaned forward and handed her a Kleenex. Oh, she had them, all right. She could have sold them the super-deluxe laser alert system, stock in the company, mikes for every flower in the garden, but the old charge just wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, fighting back a sob.

It was weird, she thought, pressing the Kleenex to her face, but the masked intruder had never affected her like this, or the knife-sharpening Mexican either. It was Coles, of course, and those sick jumpy eyes of his, but it was the signs too. She couldn’t stop thinking about those signs — if they hadn’t been there, that is, stuck in the lawn like a red flag in front of a bull… But there was no future in that. No, she told the story anyway, told it despite the chill that came over her and the thickening in her throat.

She had to. If only for her peace of mind.

(1987)

KING BEE

In the mail that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a “100 % Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos, and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usual: I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzz. Pat too, the bitch. He hadn’t bothered to sign it.

“Ken? What is it?”

Pat was right beside him now, peering over his elbow at the sheaf of ads and bills clutched in his hand. She’d been pruning the roses and she was still wearing her work gloves. They stood there out front of the house in the sunshine, hunched forward protectively, the mailbox rising up like a tombstone between them. “It’s Anthony,” she said, “isn’t it?”

He handed her the letter.

“My god,” she said, sucking in a whistle of breath like a wounded animal. “How’d he get the address?”

It was a good question. They’d known he was to be released from Juvenile Hall on his eighteenth birthday, and they’d taken precautions. Like changing their phone number, their address, their places of employment, and the city and state in which they lived. For a while, they’d even toyed with the idea of changing their name, but then Ken’s father came for a visit from Wisconsin and sobbed over the family coat of arms till they gave it up. Over the years, they’d received dozens of Anthony’s death threats — all of them bee-oriented; bees were his obsession — but nothing since they’d moved. This was bad. Worse than bad.

“You’d better call the police,” he said. “And take Skippy to the kennel.”

Nine years earlier, the Mallows had been childless. There was something wrong with Pat’s fallopian tubes — some congenital defect that reduced her odds of conception to 222,000 to one — and to compound the problem, Ken’s sperm count was inordinately low, though he ate plenty of red meat and worked out every other day on the racquetball court. Adoption had seemed the way to go, though Pat was distressed by the fact that so many of the babies available were — well, she didn’t like to say it, but they weren’t white. There were Thai babies, Guia-nese babies, Herero babies, babies from Haiti, Kuala Lumpur, and Kashmir, but Caucasian babies were at a premium. You could have a nonwhite baby in six days — for a price, of course — but there was an eleven-year waiting list for white babies — twelve for blonds, fourteen for blue-eyed blonds — and neither Ken nor Pat was used to being denied. “How about an older child?” the man from the adoption agency had suggested.

They were in one of the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-A-Kid, and Mr. Denteen, a handsome, bold-faced man in a suit woven of some exotic material, leaned forward with a fatherly smile. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Young of “Father Knows Best,” and on the wall behind him was a photomontage of plump and cooing babies. Pat was mesmerized. “What?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.

“An older child,” Denteen repeated, his voice rich with insinuation. It was the voice of a seducer, a shrink, a black-marketeer.

“No,” Ken said, “I don’t think so.”

“How old?” Pat said.

Denteen leaned forward on his leather elbow patches. “I just happen to have a child — a boy — whose file just came to us this morning. Little Anthony Cade-martori. Tony. He’s nine years old. Just. Actually, his birthday was only last week.”

The photo Denteen handed them showed a sunny, smiling, towheaded boy, a generic boy, archetypal, the sort of boy you envision when you close your eyes and think “boy.” If they’d looked closer, they would have seen that his eyes were like two poked holes and that there was something unstable about his smile and the set of his jaw, but they were in the grip of a conceit and they didn’t look that closely. Ken asked if there was anything wrong with him. “Physically, I mean,” he said.

Denteen let a good-humored little laugh escape him. “This is your average nine-year-old boy, Mr. Mallow,” he said. “Average height, weight, build, average — or above average — intelligence. He’s a boy, and he’s one heck of a lot fitter than I am.” Denteen cast a look to the heavens — or, rather, to the ceiling tiles. “To be nine years old again,” he sighed.

“Does he behave?” Pat asked.

“Does he behave?” Denteen echoed, and he looked offended, hurt almost.

“Does the President live in the White House? Does the sun come up in the morning?” He straightened up, shot his cuffs, then leaned forward again — so far forward his hands dangled over the edge of the conference table. “Look at him,” he said, holding up the picture again. “Mr. and Mrs. Mallow — Ken, Pat — let me tell you that this child has seen more heartbreak than you and I’ll know in a lifetime. His birth parents were killed at a railway crossing when he was two, and then, the irony of it, his adoptive parents — they were your age, by the way — just dropped dead one day while he was at school. One minute they’re alive and well and the next”—he snapped his finger—“they’re gone.” His voice faltered. “And then poor little Tony … poor little Tony comes home …”

Pat looked stunned. Ken reached out to squeeze her hand.

“He needs love, Pat,” Denteen said. “He has love to give. A lot of love.”

Ken looked at Pat. Pat looked at Ken.

“So,” Denteen said, “when would you like to meet him?”

They met him the following afternoon, and he seemed fine. A little shy, maybe, but fine. Super-polite, that’s what Pat thought. May I this and may I that, please, thank you, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. He was adorable. Big for his age — that was a surprise. They’d expected a lovable little urchin, the kind of kid Norman Rockwell might have portrayed in the barber’s chair atop a stack of phone books, but Anthony was big, already the size of a teenager — big-headed, big in the shoulders, and big in the rear. Tall too. At nine, he was already as tall as Pat and probably outweighed her. What won them over, though, was his smile. He turned his smile on them that first day in Denteen’s office — a blooming angelic smile that showed off his dimples and the perfection of his tiny white glistening teeth — and Pat felt something give way inside her. At the end of the meeting she hugged him to her breast.

The smile was a regular feature of those first few months — the months of the trial period. Anthony smiled at breakfast, at dinner, smiled when he helped Ken rake the leaves from the gutters or tidy up the yard, smiled in his sleep. He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal — the day that he was theirs and they were his — Anthony’s smile vanished. The change was abrupt and it came without warning.

“Scooter,” Ken called to him one afternoon, “you want to help me take those old newspapers to the recycling center and then maybe stop in at Baskin and Robbins?”

Anthony was upstairs in his room, the room they’d decorated with posters of ballplayers and airplanes. He didn’t answer.

“Scooter?”

Silence.

Puzzled, Ken ascended the stairs. As he reached the landing, he became aware of an odd sound emanating from Anthony’s room — a low hum, as of an appliance kicking in. He paused to knock at the door and the sound began to take on resonance, to swell and shrink again, a thousand muted voices speaking in unison. “Anthony?” he called, pushing open the door.

Anthony was seated naked in the middle of his bed, wearing a set of headphones Ken had never seen before. The headphones were attached to a tape player the size of a suitcase. Ken had never seen the tape player before either. And the walls — gone were the dazzling sunstruck posters of Fernando Valenzuela, P-38s, and Mitsubishi Zeroes, replaced now by black-and-white photos of insects — torn, he saw, from library books. The books lay scattered across the floor, gutted, their spines broken.

For a long moment, Ken merely stood there in the doorway, the sizzling pulse of that many-voiced hum leaking out of Anthony’s headphones to throb in his gut, his chest, his bones. It was as if he’d stumbled upon some ancient rite in the Australian Outback, as if he’d stepped out of his real life in the real world and into some cheap horror movie about demonic possession and people whose eyes lit up like Christmas-tree ornaments. Anthony was seated in the lotus position, his own eyes tightly closed. He didn’t seem to be aware of Ken. The buzzing was excruciating. After a moment, Ken backed out of the room and gently shut the door.

At dinner that evening, Anthony gave them their first taste of his why-don’t-you-get-off-my-back look, a look that was to become habitual. His hair stood up jaggedly, drawn up into needlelike points — he must have greased it, Ken realized — and he slouched as if there were an invisible piano strapped to his shoulders. Ken didn’t know where to begin — with the scowl, the nudity, the desecration of library books, the tape player and its mysterious origins (had he borrowed it — perhaps from school? a friend?). Pat knew nothing. She served chicken croquettes, biscuits with honey, and baked beans, Anthony’s favorite meal. She was at the stove, her back to them, when Ken cleared his throat.

“Anthony,” he said, “is there anything wrong? Anything you want to tell us?”

Anthony shot him a contemptuous look. He said nothing. Pat glanced over her shoulder.

“About the library books …”

“You were spying on me,” Anthony snarled.

Pat turned away from the stove, stirring spoon in hand. “What do you mean? Ken? What’s this all about?”

“I wasn’t spying, I—” Ken faltered. He felt the anger rising in him. “All right,” he said, “where’d you get the tape player?”

Anthony wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked past Ken to his adoptive mother. “I stole it,” he said.

Suddenly Ken was on his feet. “Stole it?” he roared. “Don’t you know what that means, library books and now, now stealing?”

Anthony was a statue, big-headed and serene. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.

The scene at the library was humiliating. Clearly, the books had been willfully destroyed. Mrs. Tutwillow was outraged. And no matter how hard Ken squeezed his arm, Anthony remained pokerfaced and unrepentant. “I won’t say I’m sorry,” he sneered, “because I’m not.” Ken gave her a check for $112.32, to cover the cost of replacing the books, plus shipping and handling. At Steve’s Stereo Shoppe, the man behind the counter — Steve, presumably — agreed not to press charges, but he had a real problem with offering the returned unit to the public as new goods, if Ken knew what he meant. Since he’d have to sell it used now, he wondered if Ken had the $87.50 it was going to cost him to mark it down. Of course, if Ken didn’t want to cooperate, he’d have no recourse but to report the incident to the police. Ken cooperated.

At home, after he’d ripped the offending photos from the walls and sent Anthony to his room, he phoned Denteen. “Ken, listen. I know you’re upset,” Den-teen crooned, his voice as soothing as a shot of whiskey, “but the kid’s life has been real hell, believe me, and you’ve got to realize that he’s going to need some time to adjust.” He paused. “Why don’t you get him a dog or something?”

“A dog?”

“Yeah. Something for him to be responsible for for a change. He’s been a ward — I mean, an adoptee — all this time, with people caring for him, and maybe it’s that he feels like a burden or something. With a dog or a cat he could do the giving.”

A dog. The idea of it sprang to sudden life and Ken was a boy himself again, roaming the hills and stubble fields of Wisconsin, Skippy at his side. A dog. Yes. Of course.

“And listen,” Denteen was saying, “if you think you’re going to need professional help with this, the man to go to is Maurice Barebaum. He’s one of the top child psychologists in the state, if not the country.” There was a hiss of shuffling papers, the flap of Rolodex cards. “I’ve got his number right here.”

“I don’t want a dog,” Anthony insisted, and he gave them a strained, histrionic look.

We’re onstage, Ken was thinking, that’s what it is. He looked at Pat, seated on the couch, her legs tucked under her, and then at his son, this stranger with the staved-in eyes and tallowy arms who’d somehow won the role.

“But it would be so nice,” Pat said, drawing a picture in the air, “you’d have a little friend.”

Anthony was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with red and blue letters that spelled out MEGADETH. On the reverse was the full-color representation of a stupendous bumblebee. “Oh, come off it, Pat,” he sang, a keening edge to his voice, “that’s so stupid. Dogs are so slobbery and shitty.”

“Don’t use that language,” Ken said automatically.

“A little one, maybe,” Pat said, “a cocker or a sheltie.”

“I don’t want a dog. I want a hive. A beehive. That’s what I want.” He was balancing like a tightrope walker on the edge of the fireplace apron.

“Bees?” Ken demanded. “What kind of pet is that?” He was angry. It seemed he was always angry lately.

Pat forestalled him, her tone soft as a caress. “Bees, darling?” she said. “Can you tell us what you like about them? Is it because they’re so useful, because of the honey, I mean?”

Anthony was up on one foot. He tipped over twice before he answered. “Because they have no mercy.”

“Mercy?” Pat repeated.

“Three weeks, that’s how long a worker lasts in the summer,” Anthony said.

“They kick the drones out to die. The spent workers too.” He looked at Ken.

“You fit in or you die.”

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ken was shouting; he couldn’t help himself.

Anthony’s face crumpled up. His cheeks were corrugated, the spikes of his hair stood out like thorns. “You hate me,” he whined. “You fuck, you dickhead — you hate me, don’t you, don’t you?”

“Ken!” Pat cried, but Ken already had him by the arm. “Don’t you ever—” he said.

“Ever what? Ever what? Say ‘fuck’? You do it, you do it, you do it!” Anthony was in a rage, jerking away, tears on his face, shouting. “Upstairs, at night. I hear you. Fucking. That’s what you do. Grunting and fucking just like, like, like dogs!”

“I’ll need to see him three days a week,” Dr. Barebaum said. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just climbed several flights of stairs.

Anthony was out in the car with Pat. He’d spent the past forty-five minutes sequestered with Barebaum. “Is he — is he all right?” Ken asked. “I mean, is he normal?”

Barebaum leaned back in his chair and made a little pyramid of his fingers. “Adjustment problems,” he breathed. “He’s got a lot of hostility. He’s had a difficult life.”

Ken stared down at the carpet.

“He tells me,” Barebaum dredged up the words as if from some inner fortress, “he tells me he wants a dog.”

Ken sat rigid in the chair. This must be what it feels like before they switch on the current at Sing Sing, he thought. “No, you’ve got it wrong. We wanted to get him a dog, but he said no. In fact, he went schizoid on us.”

Barebaum’s nose wrinkled up at the term “schizoid.” Ken regretted it instantly. “Yes,” the doctor drawled, “hmmph. But the fact is the boy quite distinctly told me the whole blow-up was because he does indeed want a dog. You know, Mr., ah—”

“Mallow.”

“—Mallow, we often say exactly the opposite of what we mean; you are aware of that, aren’t you?”

Ken said nothing. He studied the weave of the carpet.

After a moment, the doctor cleared his throat. “You do have health insurance?” he said.

In all, Anthony was with them just over three years. The dog — a sheltie pup Ken called “Skippy” and Anthony referred to alternately as “Ken” and “Turd”—was a mistake, they could see that now. For the first few months or so, Anthony had ignored it, except to run squealing through the house, the puppy’s warm excreta cupped in his palms, shouting, “It shit! It shit! The dog shit!” Ken, though, got to like the feel of the pup’s wet nose on his wrist as he skimmed the morning paper or sat watching TV in the evening. The pup was alive, it was high-spirited and joyful, and it brought him back to his own childhood in a way that Anthony, with his gloom and his sneer, never could have. “I want a hive,” Anthony said, over and over again. “My very own hive.”

Ken ignored him — bees were dangerous, after all, and this was a residential neighborhood — until the day Anthony finally did take an interest in Skippy. It was one of those rare days when Pat’s car was at the garage, so Ken picked her up at work and they arrived home together. The house was quiet. Skippy, who usually greeted them at the door in a paroxysm of licking, rolling, leaping, and tail-thumping, was nowhere to be seen. And Anthony, judging from the low-threshold hum washing over the house, was up in his room listening to the bee tapes Pat had given him for Christmas. “Skippy,” Ken called, “here, boy!” No Skippy. Pat checked the yard, the basement, the back room. Finally, together, they mounted the stairs to Anthony’s room.

Anthony was in the center of the bed, clad only in his underwear, reprising the ritual Ken had long since grown to accept (Dr. Barebaum claimed it was nothing to worry about—“It’s his way of meditating, that’s all, and if it calms him down, why fight it?”). Huge color photographs of bees obliterated the walls, but these were legitimate photos, clipped from the pages of The Apiarian’s Monthly, another gift from Pat. Anthony looked bloated, fatter than ever, pale and white as a grub. When he became aware of them, he slipped the headphones from his ears. “Honey,” Pat said, reaching down to ruffle his hair, “have you seen Skippy?”

It took him a moment to answer. He looked bewildered, as if she’d asked him to solve an equation or name the twenty biggest cities in Russia. “I put him in his cell,” he said finally.

“Cell?” Ken echoed.

“In the hive,” Anthony said. “The big hive.”

It was Ken who noticed the broomstick wedged against the oven door, and it was Ken who buried Skippy’s poor singed carcass and arranged to have the oven replaced — Pat wouldn’t, couldn’t cook in it, ever again. It was Ken too who lost control of himself that night and slapped Anthony’s sick pale swollen face till Pat pulled him off. In the end, Anthony got his hive, thirty thousand honeybees in a big white wooden box with fifteen frames inside, and Barebaum got to see Anthony two more days a week.

At first, the bees seemed to exert a soothing influence on the boy. He stopped muttering to himself, used his utensils at the table, and didn’t seem quite as vulnerable to mood swings as he had. After school and his daily sessions with Barebaum, he’d spend hours tending the hive, watching the bees at their compulsive work, humming softly to himself as if in a trance. Ken was worried he’d be stung and bought him a gauze bonnet and gloves, but he rarely wore them. And when he was stung — daily, it seemed — he displayed the contusions proudly, as if they were battle scars. For Ken and Pat, it was a time of accommodation, and they were quietly optimistic. Gone was the smiling boy they’d taken into their home, but at least now he wasn’t so — there was no other word for it — so odd, and he seemed less agitated, less ready to fly off the handle.

The suicide attempt took them by surprise.

Ken found him, at dusk, crouched beneath the hive and quietly bleeding from both wrists. Pat’s X-ACTO knife lay in the grass beside him, black with blood. In the hospital the next day, Anthony looked lost and vulnerable, looked like a little boy again. Barebaum was there with them. “It’s a phase,” he said, puffing for breath. “He’s been very depressed lately.”

“Why?” Pat asked, sweeping Anthony’s hair back from his forehead, stroking his swollen hands. “Your bees,” she choked. “What would your bees do without you?”

Anthony let his eyes fall shut. After a moment he lifted his lids again. His voice was faint. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.

They kept him at the Hart Mental Health Center for nine months, and then they let him come home again. Ken was against it. He’d contacted a lawyer about voiding the adoption papers — Anthony was just too much to handle; he was emotionally unstable, disturbed, dangerous; the psychiatric bills alone were killing them — but Pat overruled him. “He needs us,” she said. “He has no one else to turn to.” They were in the living room. She bent forward to light a cigarette. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she said.

“Easy?” he retorted. “You talk like it’s a war or something. I didn’t adopt a kid to go to war — or to save the world either.”

“Why did you adopt him then?”

The question took him by surprise. He looked past Pat to the kitchen, where one of Anthony’s crayon drawings — of a lopsided bee — clung to the refrigerator door, and then past the refrigerator to the window, and the lush still yard beyond. He shrugged. “For love, I guess.”

As it turned out, the question was moot — Anthony didn’t last six months this time. When they picked him up at the hospital—“Hospital,” Ken growled, “nut hatch is more like it”—they barely recognized him. He was taller and he’d put on weight. Pat couldn’t call it baby fat anymore — this was true fat, adult fat, fat that sank his eyes and strained at the seams of his pants. And his hair, his rich fine white-blond hair, was gone, shaved to a transparent stubble over a scalp the color of boiled ham. Pat chattered at him, but he got into the car without a word. Halfway home he spoke for the first time. “You know what they eat in there,” he said, “in the hospital?”

Ken felt like the straightman in a comedy routine. “What do they eat?” he said, his eyes fixed on the road.

“Shit,” Anthony said. “They eat shit. Their own shit. That’s what they eat.”

“Do you have to use that language?”

Anthony didn’t bother to respond.

At home, they discovered that the bees had managed to survive on their own, a fact that somehow seemed to depress Anthony, and after shuffling halfheartedly through the trays and getting stung six or seven times, he went up to bed.

The trouble — the final trouble, the trouble that was to take Anthony out of their hands for good — started at school. Anthony was almost twelve now, but because of his various problems, he was still in fifth grade. He was in a special program, of course, but he took lunch and recess with the other fifth-graders. On the playground, he towered over them, plainly visible a hundred yards away, like some great unmoving statue of the Buddha. The other children shied away from him instinctively, as if they knew he was beyond taunting, beyond simple joys and simple sorrows. But he was aware of them, aware in a new way, aware of the girls especially. Something had happened inside him while he was away—“Puberty,” Barebaum said, “he has urges like any other boy”—and he didn’t know how to express it.

One afternoon, he and Oliver Monteiros, another boy from the special program, cornered a fifth-grade girl behind one of the temporary classrooms. There they “stretched” her, as Anthony later told it — Oliver had her hands, Anthony her feet — stretched her till something snapped in her shoulder and Anthony felt his pants go wet. He tried to tell the principal about it, about the wetness in his pants, but the principal wouldn’t listen. Dr. Conarroe was a gray-bearded black man who believed in dispensing instant justice. He was angry, gesturing in their faces, his beard jabbing at them like a weapon. When Anthony unzipped his fly to show him what had happened, Dr. Conarroe suspended him on the spot.

Pat spoke with Anthony, and they both — she and Ken — went in to meet with Dr. Conarroe and the members of the school board. They brought Barebaum with them. Together, they were able to overcome the principal’s resistance, and Anthony, after a week’s suspension, was readmitted. “One more incident,” Conarroe said, his eyes aflame behind the discs of his wire-framed glasses, “and I don’t care how small it is, and he’s out. Is that understood?”

At least Anthony didn’t keep them in suspense. On his first day back he tracked down the girl he’d stretched, chased her into the girls’ room, and as he told it, put his “stinger” in her. The girl’s parents sued the school district, Anthony was taken into custody and remanded to Juvenile Hall following another nine-month stay at Hart, and Ken and Pat finally threw in the towel. They were exhausted, physically and emotionally, and they were in debt to Barebaum for some thirty thousand dollars above what their insurance would cover. They felt cheated, bitter, worn down to nothing. Anthony was gone, adoption a sick joke. But they had each other, and after a while — and with the help of Skippy II — they began to pick up the pieces.

And now, six years later, Anthony had come back to haunt them. Ken was enraged. He, for one, wasn’t about to be chased out of this house and this job — they’d moved once, and that was enough. If he’d found them, he’d found them — so much the worse. But this was America, and they had their rights too. While Pat took Skippy to the kennel for safekeeping, Ken phoned the police and explained the situation to an Officer Ocksler, a man whose voice was so lacking in inflection he might as well have been dead. Ken was describing the incident with Skippy the First when Officer Ocksler interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a faint animation to his voice now, as if he were fighting down a belch or passing gas, “but there’s nothing we can do.”

“Nothing you can do?” Ken couldn’t help himself: he was practically yelping. “But he broiled a harmless puppy in the oven, raped a fifth-grade girl, sent us thirty-two death threats, and tracked us down even though we quit our jobs, packed up and moved, and left no forwarding address.” He took a deep breath. “He thinks he’s a bee, for christsake.”

Officer Ocksler inserted his voice into the howling silence that succeeded this outburst. “He commits a crime,” he said, the words stuck fast in his throat, “you call us.”

The next day’s mail brought the second threat. It came in the form of a picture postcard, addressed to Pat, and postmarked locally. The picture — a Japanese print — showed a pale fleshy couple engaged in the act of love. The message, which took some deciphering, read as follows:

Dear Mother Pat,

I’m a King Bee,

Gonna buzz round your hive,

Together we can make honey

Let me come inside.

Your son, Anthony

Ken tore it to pieces. He was red in the face, trembling. White babies, he thought bitterly. An older child. They would have been better off with a seven-foot Bantu, an Eskimo, anything. “I’ll kill him,” he said. “He comes here, I’ll kill him.”

It was early the next morning — Pat was in the kitchen, Ken upstairs shaving — when a face appeared in the kitchen window. It was a large and familiar face, transformed somewhat by the passage of the years and the accumulation of flesh, but unmistakable nonetheless. Pat, who was leaning over the sink to rinse her coffee cup, gave a little gasp of recognition.

Anthony was smiling, beaming at her like the towheaded boy in the photograph she’d kept in her wallet all these years. He was smiling, and suddenly that was all that mattered to her. The sweetness of those first few months came back in a rush — he was her boy, her own, and the rest of it was nothing — and before she knew what she was doing she had the back door open. It was a mistake. The moment the door swung open, she heard them. Bees. A swarm that blackened the side of the house, the angry hiss of their wings like grease in a fryer. They were right there, right beside the door. First one bee, then another, shot past her head. “Mom,” Anthony said, stepping up onto the porch, “I’m home.”

She was stunned. It wasn’t just the bees, but Anthony. He was huge, six feet tall at least, and so heavy. His pants — they were pajamas, hospital-issue — were big as a tent, and it looked as if he’d rolled up a carpet beneath his shirt. She could barely make out his eyes, sunk in their pockets of flesh. She didn’t know what to say.

He took hold of the door. “I want a hug,” he said, “give me a hug.”

She backed away from him instinctively. “Ken!” she called, and the catch in her throat turned it into a mournful, drawnout bleat. “Ken!”

Anthony was poised on the threshold. His smile faded. Then, like a magician, he reached out his hand and plunged it into the mass of bees. She saw him wince as he was stung, heard the harsh sizzle of the insects rise in crescendo, and then he drew back his hand, ever so slowly, and the bees came with him. They moved so fast — glutinous, like meringue clinging to a spoon — that she nearly missed it. There was something in his hand, a tiny box, some sort of mesh, and then his hand was gone, his arm, the right side of his body, his face and head and the left side too. Suddenly he was alive with bees, wearing them, a humming, pulsating ball of them.

She felt a sharp pain in her ankle, then another at her throat. She backed up a step.

“You sent me away,” Anthony scolded, and the bees clung to his lips. “You never loved me. Nobody ever loved me.”

She heard Ken behind her—“What is this?” he said, and then a weak curse escaped him — but she couldn’t turn. The hum of the bees mesmerized her. They clung to Anthony, one mind, thirty thousand bodies.

And then the blazing ball of Anthony’s hand separated itself from his body and his bee-thick fingers opened to reveal the briefest glimpse of the gauze-covered box. “The queen,” Anthony said. “I throw her down and you’re”—she could barely hear him, the bees raging, Ken shouting out her name—“you’re history. Both of you.”

For a long moment Anthony stood there motionless, afloat in bees. Huge as he was, he seemed to hover over the linoleum, derealized in the mass of them. And then she knew what was going to happen, knew that she was barren then and now and forever and that it was meant to be, and that this, her only child, was beyond human help or understanding.

“Go away,” Anthony said, the swarm thrilling louder, “go … into the … next room … before, before—” and then Ken had her by the arm and they were moving. She thought she heard Anthony sigh, and as she darted a glance back over her shoulder he crushed the box with a snap loud as the crack of a limb. There was an answering roar from the bees, and in her last glimpse of him he was falling, borne down by the terrible animate weight of them.

“I’ll kill him,” Ken spat, his shoulder pressed to the parlor door. Bees rattled against the panels like hailstones.

She couldn’t catch her breath. She felt a sudden stab under her collar, and then another. Ken’s words didn’t make sense — Anthony was gone from them now, gone forever — didn’t he understand that? She listened to the bees raging round her kitchen, stinging blindly, dying for their queen. And then she thought of Anthony, poor Anthony, in his foster homes, in the hospital, in prison, thought of his flesh scored a thousand, ten thousand times, wound in his cerement of bees.

He was wrong, she thought, leaning into the door as if bracing herself against a storm, they do have mercy. They do.

(1988)

SINKING HOUSE

When Monty’s last breath caught somewhere in the back of his throat with a sound like the tired wheeze of an old screen door, the first thing she did was turn on the water. She leaned over him a minute to make sure, then she wiped her hands on her dress and shuffled into the kitchen. Her fingers trembled as she jerked at the lever and felt the water surge against the porcelain. Steam rose in her face; a glitter of liquid leapt for the drain. Croak, that’s what they called it. Now she knew why. She left the faucet running in the kitchen and crossed the gloomy expanse of the living room, swung down the hallway to the guest bedroom, and turned on both taps in the bathroom there. It was almost as an afterthought that she decided to fill the tub too.

For a long while she sat in the leather armchair in the living room. The sound of running water — pure, baptismal, as uncomplicated as the murmur of a brook in Vermont or a toilet at the Waldorf — soothed her. It trickled and trilled, burbling from either side of the house and driving down the terrible silence that crouched in the bedroom over the lifeless form of her husband.

The afternoon was gone and the sun plunging into the canopy of the big eucalyptus behind the Finkelsteins’ when she finally pushed herself up from the chair. Head down, arms moving stiffly at her sides, she scuffed out the back door, crossed the patio, and bent to turn on the sprinklers. They sputtered and spat — not enough pressure, that much she understood — but finally came to life in halfhearted umbrellas of mist. She left the hose trickling in the rose garden, then went back into the house, passed through the living room, the kitchen, the master bedroom — not even a glance for Monty, no: she wouldn’t look at him, not yet — and on into the master bath. The taps were weak, barely a trickle, but she left them on anyway, then flushed the toilet and pinned down the float with the brick Monty had used as a doorstop. And then finally, so weary she could barely lift her arms, she leaned into the stall and flipped on the shower.

Two weeks after the ambulance came for the old man next door, Meg Terwilliger was doing her stretching exercises on the prayer rug in the sunroom, a menthol cigarette glowing in the ashtray on the floor beside her, the new CD by Sandee and the Sharks thumping out of the big speakers in the corners. Meg was twenty-three, with the fine bones and haunted eyes of a poster child. She wore her black hair cut close at the temples, long in front, and she used a sheeny black eyeshadow to bring out the hunger in her eyes. In half an hour she’d have to pick up Tiffany at nursery school, drop off the dog at the veterinarian’s, take Sonny’s shirts to the cleaner’s, buy a pound and a half of thresher shark, cilantro, and flour tortillas at the market, and start the burritos for supper. But now, she was stretching.

She took a deep drag on the cigarette, tugged at her right foot, and brought it up snug against her buttocks. After a moment she released it and drew back her left foot in its place. One palm flat on the floor, her head bobbing vaguely to the beat of the music, she did half a dozen repetitions, then paused to relight her cigarette. It wasn’t until she turned over to do her straight-leg lifts that she noticed the dampness in the rug.

Puzzled, she rose to her knees and reached behind her to rub at the twin wet spots on the seat of her sweats. She lifted the corner of the rug, suspecting the dog, but there was no odor of urine. Looking closer, she saw that the concrete floor was a shade darker beneath the rug, as if it were bleeding moisture as it sometimes did in the winter. But this wasn’t winter, this was high summer in Los Angeles and it hadn’t rained for months. Cursing Sonny — he’d promised her ceramic tile and though she’d run all over town to get the best price on a nice Italian floral pattern, he still hadn’t found the time to go look at it — she shot back the sliding door and stepped into the yard to investigate.

Immediately, she felt the Bermuda grass squelch beneath the soles of her aerobic shoes. She hadn’t taken three strides — the sun in her face, Queenie yapping frantically from the fenced-in pool area — and her feet were wet. Had Sonny left the hose running? Or Tiffany? She slogged across the lawn, the pastel Reeboks spattered with wet, and checked the hose. It was innocently coiled on its tender, the tap firmly shut. Queenie’s yapping went up an octave. The heat — it must have been ninety-five, a hundred — made her feel faint. She gazed up into the cloudless sky, then bent to check each of the sprinklers in succession.

She was poking around in the welter of bushes along the fence, looking for an errant sprinkler, when she thought of the old lady next door — Muriel, wasn’t that her name? What with her husband dying and all, maybe she’d left the hose running and forgotten all about it. Meg rose on her tiptoes to peer over the redwood fence that separated her yard from the neighbors’ and found herself looking into a glistening, sunstruck garden, with banks of Impatiens, bird of paradise, oleander, and loquat, roses in half a dozen shades. The sprinklers were on and the hose was running. For a long moment Meg stood there, mesmerized by the play of light through the drifting fans of water; she was wondering what it would be like to be old, thinking of how it would be if Sonny died and Tiffany were grown up and gone. She’d probably forget to turn off the sprinklers too.

The moment passed. The heat was deadening, the dog hysterical. Meg knew she would have to do something about the sodden yard and wet floor in the sun-room, but she dreaded facing the old woman. What would she say — I’m sorry your husband died but could you turn off the sprinklers? She was thinking maybe she’d phone — or wait till Sonny got home and let him handle it — when she stepped back from the fence and sank to her ankles in mud.

When the doorbell rang, Muriel was staring absently at the cover of an old National Geographic which lay beneath a patina of dust on the coffee table. The cover photo showed the beige and yellow sands of some distant desert, rippled to the horizon with corrugations that might have been waves on a barren sea. Monty was dead and buried. She wasn’t eating much. Or sleeping much either. The sympathy cards sat unopened on the table in the kitchen, where the tap overflowed the sink and water plunged to the floor with a pertinacity that was like a redemption. When it was quiet — in the early morning or late at night — she could distinguish the separate taps, each with its own voice and rhythm, as they dripped and trickled from the far corners of the house. In those suspended hours she could make out the comforting gurgle of the toilet in the guest room, the musical wash of the tub as water cascaded over the lip of its porcelain dam, the quickening rush of the stream in the hallway as it shot like a miniature Niagara down the chasm of the floor vent … she could hear the drip in the master bedroom, the distant hiss of a shower, and the sweet external sizzle of the sprinklers on the back lawn.

But now she heard the doorbell.

Wearily, gritting her teeth against the pain in her lower legs and the damp lingering ache of her feet, she pushed herself up from the chair and sloshed her way to the door. The carpet was black with water, soaked through like a sponge — and in a tidy corner of her mind she regretted it — but most of the runoff was finding its way to the heating vents and the gaps in the corners where Monty had miscalculated the angle of the baseboard. She heard it dripping somewhere beneath the house and for a moment pictured the water lying dark and still in a shadowy lagoon that held the leaking ship of the house poised on its trembling surface. The doorbell sounded again. “All right, all right,” she muttered, “I’m coming.”

A girl with dark circles round her eyes stood on the doorstep. She looked vaguely familiar, and for a moment Muriel thought she recognized her from a TV program about a streetwalker who rises up to kill her pimp and liberate all the other leather-clad, black-eyed streetwalkers of the neighborhood, but then the girl spoke and Muriel realized her mistake. “Hi,” the girl said, and Muriel saw that her shoes were black with mud, “I’m your neighbor? Meg Terwilliger?”

Muriel was listening to the bathroom sink. She said nothing. The girl looked down at her muddy shoes. “I, uh, just wanted to tell you that we’re, uh — Sonny and I, I mean — he’s my husband? — we’re sorry about your trouble and all, but I wondered if you knew your sprinklers were on out back?”

Muriel attempted a smile — surely a smile was appropriate at this juncture, wasn’t it? — but managed only to lift her upper lip back from her teeth in a sort of wince or grimace.

The girl was noticing the rug now, and Muriel’s sodden slippers. She looked baffled, perhaps even a little frightened. And young. So young. Muriel had had a young friend once, a girl from the community college who used to come to the house before Monty got sick. She had a tape recorder, and she would ask them questions about their childhood, about the days when the San Fernando Valley was dirt roads and orange groves. Oral history, she called it. “It’s all right,” Muriel said, trying to reassure her.

“I just — is it a plumbing problem?” the girl said, backing away from the door. “Sonny …” she said, but didn’t finish the thought. She ducked her head and retreated down the steps, but when she reached the walk she wheeled around. “I mean you really ought to see about the sprinklers,” she blurted, “the whole place is soaked, my sunroom and everything—”

“It’s all right,” Muriel repeated, and then the girl was gone and she shut the door.

“She’s nuts, she is. Really. I mean she’s out of her gourd.”

Meg was searing chunks of thresher shark in a pan with green chilies, sweet red pepper, onion, and cilantro. Sonny, who was twenty-eight and so intoxicated by real estate he had to forgo the morning paper till he got home at night, was slumped in the breakfast nook with a vodka tonic and the sports pages. His white-blond hair was cut fashionably, in what might once have been called a flattop, though it was thinning, and his open, appealing face, with its boyish look, had begun to show sings of wear, particularly around the eyes, where years of escrow had taken their toll. Tiffany was in her room, playing quietly with a pair of six-inch dolls that had cost sixty-five dollars each.

“Who?” Sonny murmured, tugging unconsciously at the gold chain he wore around his neck.

“Muriel. The old lady next door. Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve been saying?”

With an angry snap of her wrist, Meg cut the heat beneath the saucepan and clapped a lid over it. “The floor in the sunroom is flooded, for god’s sake,” she said, stalking across the kitchen in her bare feet till she stood poised over him. “The rug is ruined. Or almost is. And the yard—”

Sonny slapped the paper down on the table. “All right! Just let me relax a minute, will you?”

She put on her pleading look. It was a look compounded of pouty lips, tousled hair, and those inevitable eyes, and it always had its effect on him. “One minute,” she murmured. “That’s all it’ll take. I just want you to see the backyard.”

She took him by the hand and led him through the living room to the sun-room, where he stood a moment contemplating the damp spot on the concrete floor. She was surprised herself at how the spot had grown — it was three times what it had been this afternoon, and it seemed to have sprouted wings and legs like an enormous Rorschach. She pictured a butterfly. Or no, a hovering crow or bat. She wondered what Muriel would have made of it.

Outside, she let out a little yelp of disgust — all the earthworms in the yard had crawled up on the step to die. And the lawn wasn’t merely spongy now, it was soaked through, puddled like a swamp. “Jesus Christ,” Sonny muttered, sinking in his wingtips. He cakewalked across the yard to where the fence had begun to sag, the post leaning drunkenly, the slats bowed. “Will you look at this?” he shouted over his shoulder. Squeamish about the worms, Meg stood at the door to the sunroom. “The goddam fence is falling down!”

He stood there a moment, water seeping into his shoes, a look of stupefaction on his face. Meg recognized the look. It stole over his features in moments of extremity, as when he tore open the phone bill to discover mysterious twenty-dollar calls to Billings, Montana, and Greenleaf, Mississippi, or when his buyer called on the day escrow was. to close to tell him he’d assaulted the seller and wondered if Sonny had five hundred dollars for bail. These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad business sense. Meg watched the look of disbelief turn to one of injured rage. She followed him through the house, up the walk, and into Muriel’s yard, where he stalked up to the front door and pounded like the Gestapo.

There was no response.

“Son of a bitch,” he spat, turning to glare over his shoulder at her as if it were her fault or something. From inside they could hear the drama of running water, a drip and gurgle, a sough and hiss. Sonny turned back to the door, hammering his fist against it till Meg swore she could see the panels jump.

It frightened her, this sudden rage. Sure, there was a problem here and she was glad he was taking care of it, but did he have to get violent, did he have to get crazy? “You don’t have to beat her door down,” she called, focusing on the swell of his shoulder and the hammer of his fist as it rose and fell in savage rhythm. “Sonny, come on. It’s only water, for god’s sake.”

“Only?” he snarled, spinning round to face her. “You saw the fence — next thing you know the foundation’ll shift on us. The whole damn house—” He never finished. The look on her face told him that Muriel had opened the door.

Muriel was wearing the same faded blue housecoat she’d had on earlier, and the same wet slippers. Short, heavyset, so big in front it seemed as if she were about to topple over, she clung to the doorframe and peered up at Sonny out of a stony face. Meg watched as Sonny jerked round to confront her and then stopped cold when he got a look at the interior of the house. The plaster walls were stained now, drinking up the wet in long jagged fingers that clawed toward the ceiling, and a dribble of coffee-colored liquid began to seep across the doorstep and puddle at Sonny’s feet. The sound of rushing water was unmistakable, even from where Meg was standing. “Yes?” Muriel said, the voice withered in her throat. “Can I help you?”

It took Sonny a minute — Meg could see it in his eyes: this was more than he could handle, willful destruction of a domicile, every tap in the place on full, the floors warped, plaster ruined — but then he recovered himself. “The water,” he said. “You — our fence — I mean you can’t, you’ve got to stop this—”

The old woman drew herself up, clutching the belt of her housedress till her knuckles bulged with the tension. She looked first at Meg, still planted in the corner of the yard, and then turned to Sonny. “Water?” she said. “What water?”

The young man at the door reminded her, in a way, of Monty. Something about the eyes or the set of the ears — or maybe it was the crisp high cut of the sideburns … Of course, most young men reminded her of Monty. The Monty of fifty years ago, that is. The Monty who’d opened up the world to her over the shift lever of his Model-A Ford, not the crabbed and abrasive old man who called her bonehead and dildo and cuffed her like a dog. Monty. She saw him pinned beneath his tubes in the hospital and something stirred in her; she brought him home and changed his bedpan, peered into the vaults of his eyes, fed him Gerber’s like the baby she’d never had, and she knew it was over. Fifty years. No more drunken rages, no more pans flung against the wall, never again his sour flesh pressed to hers. She was on top now.

The second young man — he was a Mexican, short, stocky, with a mustache so thin it could have been penciled on and wicked little red-flecked eyes — also reminded her of Monty. Not so much in the way he looked as in the way he held himself, the way he swaggered and puffed out his chest. And the uniform too, of course. Monty had worn a uniform during the war.

“Mrs. Burgess?” the Mexican asked.

Muriel stood at the open door. It was dusk, the heat cut as if there were a thermostat in the sky. She’d been sitting in the dark. The electricity had gone out on her — something to do with the water and the wires. She nodded her head in response to the policeman’s question.

“We’ve had a complaint,” he said.

Little piggy eyes. A complaint. We’ve had a complaint. He wasn’t fooling her, not for a minute. She knew what they wanted, the police, the girl next door, and the boy she was married to — they wanted to bring Monty back. Prop him up against the bedframe, stick his legs back under him, put the bellow back in his voice. Oh, no, they weren’t fooling her.

She followed the policeman around the darkened house as he went from faucet to faucet, sink to tub to shower. He firmly twisted each of the taps closed and drained the basins, then crossed the patio to kill the sprinklers and the hose too. “Are you all right?” he kept asking. “Are you all right?”

She had to hold her chin in her palm to keep her lips from trembling. “If you mean am I in possession of my faculties, yes, I am, thank you. I am all right.”

They were back at the front door now. He leaned nonchalantly against the doorframe and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “So what’s this with the water then?”

She wouldn’t answer him. She knew her rights. What business was it of his, or anybody’s, what she did with her own taps and her own sprinklers? She could pay the water bill. Had paid it, in fact. Eleven hundred dollars’ worth. She watched his eyes and shrugged.

“Next of kin?” he asked. “Daughter? Son? Anybody we can call?”

Now her lips held. She shook her head.

He gave it a moment, then let out a sigh. “Okay,” he said, speaking slowly and with exaggerated emphasis, as if he were talking to a child, “I’m going now. You leave the water alone — wash your face, brush your teeth, do the dishes. But no more of this.” He swaggered back from her, fingering his belt, his holster, the dead weight of his nightstick. “One more complaint and we’ll have to take you into custody for your own good. You’re endangering yourself and the neighbors too. Understand?”

Smile, she told herself, smile. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “Yes, I understand.”

He held her eyes a moment, threatening her — just like Monty used to do, just like Monty — and then he was gone.

She stood there on the doorstep a long while, the night deepening around her. She listened to the cowbirds, the wild parakeets that nested in the Murtaughs’ palm, the whoosh of traffic from the distant freeway. After a while, she sat on the step. Behind her, the house was silent: no faucet dripped, no sprinkler hissed, no toilet gurgled. It was horrible. Insupportable. In the pit of that dry silence she could hear him, Monty, treading the buckled floors, pouring himself another vodka, cursing her in a voice like sandpaper.

She couldn’t go back in there. Not tonight. The place was deadly, contaminated, sick as the grave — after all was said and done, it just wasn’t clean enough. If the rest of it was a mystery — oral history, fifty years of Monty, the girl with the blackened eyes — that much she understood.

Meg was watering the cane plant in the living room when the police cruiser came for the old lady next door. The police had been there the night before and Sonny had stood out front with arms folded while the officer shut down Muriel’s taps and sprinklers. “I guess that’s that,” he said, coming up the walk in the oversized Hawaiian shirt she’d given him for Father’s Day. But in the morning, the sprinklers were on again and Sonny called the local substation three times before he left for work. She’s crazy, he’d hollered into the phone, irresponsible, a threat to herself and the community. He had a four-year-old daughter to worry about, for Christ’s sake. A dog. A wife. His fence was falling down. Did they have any idea what that amount of water was going to do to the substrata beneath the house?

Now the police were back. The patrol car stretched across the window and slid silently into the driveway next door. Meg set down the watering can. She was wearing her Fila sweats and a new pair of Nikes and her hair was tied back in a red scarf. She’d dropped Tiffany off at nursery school, but she had the watering and her stretching exercises to do and a pasta salad to make before she picked up Queenie at the vet’s. Still, she went directly to the front door and then out onto the walk.

The police — it took her a minute to realize that the shorter of the two was a woman — were on Muriel’s front porch, looking stiff and uncertain in their razor-creased uniforms. The man knocked first — once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. Then the woman knocked. Still nothing. Meg folded her arms and waited. After a minute, the man went around to the side gate and let himself into the yard. Meg heard the sprinklers die with a wheeze, and then the officer was back, his shoes heavy with mud.

Again he thumped at the door, much more violently now, and Meg thought of Sonny. “Open up,” the woman called in a breathy contralto she tried unsuccessfully to deepen, “police.”

It was then that Meg saw her, Muriel, at the bay window on the near side of the door. “Look,” she shouted before she knew what she was saying, “she’s there, there in the window!”

The male officer — he had a mustache and pale, fine hair like Sonny’s — leaned out over the railing and gestured impatiently at the figure behind the window. “Police,” he growled. “Open the door.” Muriel never moved. “All right,” he grunted, cursing under his breath, “all right,” and he put his shoulder to the door. There was nothing to it. The frame splintered, water dribbled out, and both officers disappeared into the house.

Meg waited. She had things to do, yes, but she waited anyway, bending to pull the odd dandelion the gardener had missed, trying to look busy. The police were in there an awful long time — twenty minutes, half an hour — and then the woman appeared in the doorway with Muriel.

Muriel seemed heavier than ever, her face pouchy, arms swollen. She was wearing white sandals on her old splayed feet, a shapeless print dress, and a white straw hat that looked as if it had been dug out of a box in the attic. The woman had her by the arm; the man loomed behind her with a suitcase. Down the steps and up the walk, she never turned her head. But then, just as the policewoman was helping her into the backseat of the patrol car, Muriel swung round as if to take one last look at her house. But it wasn’t the house she was looking at: it was Meg.

The morning gave way to the heat of afternoon. Meg finished the watering, made the pasta salad — bow-tie twists, fresh salmon, black olives, and pine nuts — ran her errands, picked up Tiffany, and put her down for a nap. Somehow, though, she just couldn’t get Muriel out of her head. The old lady had stared at her for five seconds maybe, and then the policewoman was coaxing her into the car. Meg had felt like sinking into the ground. But then she realized that Muriel’s look wasn’t vengeful at all — it was just sad. It was a look that said this is what it comes to. Fifty years and this is what it comes to.

The backyard was an inferno, the sun poised directly overhead. Queenie, de-fleaed, shampooed, and with her toenails clipped, was stretched out asleep in the shade beside the pool. It was quiet. Even the birds were still. Meg took off her Nikes and walked barefoot through the sopping grass to the fence, or what was left of it. The post had buckled overnight, canting the whole business into Muriel’s yard. Meg never hesitated. She sprang up onto the plane of the slats and dropped to the grass on the other side.

Her feet sank in the mud, the earth like pudding, like chocolate pudding, and as she lifted her feet to move toward the house the tracks she left behind her slowly filled with water. The patio was an island. She crossed it, dodging potted plants and wicker furniture, and tried the back door; finding it locked, she moved to the window, shaded her face with her hands, and peered in. The sight made her catch her breath. The plaster was crumbling, wallpaper peeling, the rug and floors ruined: she knew it was bad, but this was crazy, this was suicide.

Grief, that’s what it was. Or was it? And then she was thinking of Sonny again — what if he was dead and she was old like Muriel? She wouldn’t be so fat, of course, but maybe like one of those thin and elegant old ladies in Palm Springs, the ones who’d done their stretching all their lives. Or what if she wasn’t an old lady at all — the thought swooped down on her like a bird out of the sky — what if Sonny was in a car wreck or something? It could happen.

She stood there gazing in on the mess through her own wavering reflection. One moment she saw the wreckage of the old lady’s life, the next the fine mouth and expressive eyes everyone commented on. After a while, she turned away from the window and looked out on the yard as Muriel must have seen it. There were the roses, gorged with water and flowering madly, the Impatiens, rigid as sticks, oleander drowning in their own yellowed leaves — and there, poking innocuously from the bushes at the far corner of the patio, was the steel wand that controlled the sprinklers. Handle, neck, prongs: it was just like theirs.

And then it came to her. She’d turn them on — the sprinklers — just for a minute, to see what it felt like. She wouldn’t leave them on long — it could threaten the whole foundation of her house.

That much she understood.

(1987)

THE DEVIL AND IRV CHERNISKE

Just outside the sleepy little commuter village of Irvington, New York, there stands a subdivision of half-million-dollar homes, each riding its own sculpted acre like a ship at sea and separated from its neighbors by patches of scrub and the forlorn-looking beeches that lend a certain pricey and vestigial air to the place. The stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and software salesmen who live here with their families know their community as Beechwood, in deference to the legend hammered into the slab of pink marble at the entrance of Beechwood Drive. This slab was erected by the developer, Sal Maggio, in the late nineteen-sixties, though there are few here now who can remember that far back. For better or worse, Beechwood is the sort of community in which the neighbors don’t know one another and don’t really care to, though they do survey each other’s gardeners and automobiles with all the perspicacity of appraisers, and while the proper names of the people next door may escape them, they are quick to invent such colorful sobriquets as the Geeks, the Hackers, the Volvos, and the Chinks by way of compensation.

For the most part, the handsome sweeping macadam streets go untrodden but for the occasional backward jogger, and the patches of wood are ignored to the point at which they’ve begun to revert to the condition of the distant past, to the time before Maggio’s bulldozer, when the trees stretched unbroken all the way to Ardsley. Fieldmice make their home in these woods, moths, spiders, sparrows, and squirrels. In the late afternoon, garter snakes silently thread the high rank thick-stemmed morass of bluegrass gone wild, and toads thump from one fetid puddle to another. An unpropitious place, these woods. A forgotten place. But it was here, in one of these primordial pockets, beneath a wind-ravaged maple and within earshot of the chit-chit-chit of the gray squirrel, that Irv Cherniske made the deal of his life.

Irv was one of the senior residents of Beechwood, having moved into his buff-and-chocolate Tudor with the imitation flagstone façade some three years earlier. He was a hard-nosed cynic in his early forties, a big-headed, heavy-paunched, irascible stock trader who’d seen it all — and then some. The characteristic tone of his voice was an unmodulated roar, but this was only the daintiest of counterpoint to the stentorian bellow of his wife, Tish. The two fought so often and at such a pitch that their young sons, Shane and Morgan, often took refuge in the basement game room while the battle raged over their heads and out across the placid rolling lawns of Beechwood Estates. To the neighbors, these battles were a source of rueful amusement: separately, yet unanimously, they had devised their own pet nickname for the Cherniskes. A torn, ragged cry would cut the air around dinnertime each evening, and someone would lift a watery gimlet to his lips and remark, with a sigh, that the Screechers were at it again.

One evening, after a particularly bracing confrontation with his wife over the question of who had last emptied the trash receptacle in the guest room, Irv was out in the twilit backyard, practicing his chip shot and swatting mosquitoes. It was the tail end of a long Fourth of July weekend, and an unearthly stillness had settled over Beechwood, punctuated now and again by the distant muffled pop of leftover fireworks. The air was muggy and hot, a fiery breath of the tropics more suitable to Rangoon than New York. Irv bent in the fading light to address a neon-orange Titleist. Behind him, in the house which seemed almost to sink under the weight of its mortgage, Tish and his sons were watching TV, the muted sounds of conflict and sorrow carrying fitfully to where he stood in the damp grass, awash in birdsong. He raised the nine-iron, dropped it in a fluid rush, and watched the ball rise mightily into the darkening belly of the sky. Unfortunately, he overshot the makeshift flag he’d set up at the foot of the lawn and carried on into the ragged clump of trees beyond it.

With a curse, Irv trundled down the hill and pushed his way through the mounds of cuttings the gardener had piled up like breastworks at the edge of the woods and a moment later found himself in the hushed and shadowy stand of beeches. An odor of slow rot assaulted his nostrils. Crickets chirruped. There was no sign of the ball. He was kicking aimlessly through the leaves, all but certain it was gone for good — two and a half bucks down the drain — when he was startled by a noise from the gloom up ahead.

Something — or someone — was coming toward him, a presence announced by the crush of brittle leaves and the hiss of uncut grass. “Who is it?” he demanded, and the crickets fell silent. “Is someone there?”

The shape of a man began to emerge gradually from the shadows — head and shoulders first, then a torso that kept getting bigger. And bigger. His skin was dark — so dark Irv at first took him to be a Negro — and a wild feral shock of hair stood up jaggedly from his crown like the mane of a hyena. The man said nothing.

Irv was not easily daunted. He believed in the Darwinian struggle, believed, against all signs to the contrary, that he’d risen to the top of the pack and that the choicest morsels of the feast of life were his for the taking. And though he wasn’t nearly the bruiser he’d been when he started at nose tackle for Fox Lane High, he was used to wielding his paunch like a weapon and blustering his way through practically anything, from a potential mugging right on down to putting a snooty maître d’ in his place. For all that, though, when he saw the size of the man, when he factored in his complexion and considered the oddness of the circumstances, he felt uncertain of himself. Felt as if the parameters of the world as he knew it had suddenly shifted. Felt, unaccountably, that he was in deep trouble. Characteristically, he fell back on bluster. “Who in hell are you?” he demanded.

The stranger, he now saw, wasn’t black at all. Or, rather, he wasn’t a Negro, as he’d first supposed, but something else altogether. Swarthy, that’s what he was. Like a Sicilian or a Greek. Or maybe an Arab. He saw too that the man was dressed almost identically to himself, in a Lacoste shirt, plaid slacks, and white Adidas. But this was no golf club dangling from the stranger’s fingertips — it was a chainsaw. “Hell?” the big man echoed, his voice starting down low and then rising in mockery. “I don’t believe it. Did you actually say ‘Who in hell are you?’?” He began to laugh in a shallow, breathy, and decidedly unsettling way.

It was getting darker by the minute, the trunks of the trees receding into the shadows, stars dimly visible now in the dome of the sky. There was a distant sound of fireworks and a sharp sudden smell of gunpowder on the air. “Are you … are you somebody’s gardener or something?” Irv asked, glancing uncomfortably at the chainsaw.

This got the stranger laughing so hard he had to pound his breastbone and wipe the tears from his eyes. “Gardener?” he hooted, stamping around in the undergrowth and clutching his sides with the sheer hilarity of it. “You’ve got to be kidding. Come on, tell me you’re kidding.”

Irv felt himself growing annoyed. “I mean, because if you’re not,” he said, struggling to control his voice, “then I want to know what you’re doing back here with that saw. This is private property, you know.”

Abruptly, the big man stopped laughing. When he spoke, all trace of amusement had faded from his voice. “Oh?” he growled. “And just who does it belong to, then — it wouldn’t be yours, by any chance, would it?”

It wasn’t. As Irv well knew. In fact, he’d done a little title-searching six months back, when Tish had wanted to mow down the beeches and put in an ornamental koi pond with little pink bridges and mechanical waterfalls. The property, useless as it was, belonged to the old bird next door—“the Geek” was the only name Irv knew him by. Irv thought of bluffing, but the look in the stranger’s eye made him think better of it. “It belongs to the old guy next door — Beltzer, I think his name is. Bitzer. Something like that.”

The stranger was smiling now, but the smile wasn’t a comforting one. “I see,” he said. “So I guess you’re trespassing too.”

Irv had had enough. “We’ll let the police decide that,” he snapped, turning to stalk back up the lawn.

“Hey, Irv,” the stranger said suddenly, “don’t get huffy — old man Belcher won’t be needing this plot anymore. You can hide all the golf balls you want down here.”

The gloom thickened. Somewhere a dog began to howl. Irv felt the tight hairs at the base of his neck begin to stiffen. “How do you know my name?” he said, whirling around. “And how do you know what Belcher needs or doesn’t need?” All of a sudden, Irv had the odd feeling that he’d seen this stranger somewhere before — real estate, wasn’t it?

“Because he’ll be dead five minutes from now, that’s how.” The big man let out a disgusted sigh. “Let’s quit pissing around here — you know damn well who I am, Irv.” He paused. “October twenty-two, 1955, Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart Church in Mount Kisco. Monsignor O’Kane. The topic is the transub-stantiation of the flesh and you’re screwing around with Alfred LaFarga in the back pew, talking ‘Saturday Night Creature Features.’ ‘Did you see it when the mummy pulled that guy’s eyes out?’ you whispered. Alfred was this ratty little clown, looked like his shoulders were going to fall through his chest — now making a killing in grain futures in Des Moines, by the way — and he says, ‘That wasn’t his eye, shit-for-brains, it was his tongue.’”

Irv was stunned. Shocked silent for maybe the first time in his life. He’d seen it all, yes — but not this. It was incredible, it really was. He’d given up on all that God and Devil business the minute he left parochial school — no percentage in it — and now here it was, staring him in the face. It took him about thirty seconds to reinvent the world, and then he was thinking there might just be something in it for him. “All right,” he said, “all right, yeah, I know who you are. Question is, what do you want with me?”

The stranger’s face was consumed in shadow now, but Irv could sense that he was grinning. “Smart, Irv,” the big man said, all the persuasion of a born closer creeping into his voice. “What’s in it for me, right? Let’s make a deal, right? The wife isn’t working, the kids need designer jeans, PCs, and dirt bikes, and the mortgage has you on the run, am I right?”

He was right — of course he was right. How many times, bullying some loser over the phone or wheedling a few extra bucks out of some grasping old hag’s retirement account, had Irv wondered if it was all worth it? How many times had he shoved his way through a knot of pink-haired punks on the subway only to get home all the sooner to his wife’s nagging and his sons’ pale, frightened faces? How many times had he told himself he deserved more, much more — ease and elegance, regular visits to the track and the Caribbean, his own firm, the two or maybe three million he needed to bail himself out for good? He folded his arms. The stranger, suddenly, was no more disturbing than sweet-faced Ben Franklin gazing up benevolently from a mountain of C-notes. “Talk to me,” Irv said.

The big man took him by the arm and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. He wanted the usual deal, nothing less, and he held out to Irv the twin temptations of preternatural business success and filthy lucre. The lucre was buried right there in that shabby patch of woods, a hoard of Krugerrands, bullion, and silver candlesticks socked away by old man Belcher as a hedge against runaway inflation. The business success would result from the collusion of his silent partner — who was leaning into him now and giving off an odor oddly like that of a Szechuan kitchen — and it would take that initial stake and double and redouble it till it grew beyond counting. “What do you say, Irv?” the stranger crooned.

Irv said nothing. He was no fool. Poker face, he told himself. Never look eager. “I got to think about it,” he said. He was wondering vaguely if he could rent a metal detector or something and kiss the creep off. “Give me twenty-four hours.”

The big man drew away from him. “Hmph,” he grunted contemptuously. “You think I come around every day? This is the deal of a lifetime I’m talking here, Irv.” He paused a moment to let this sink in. “You don’t want it, I can always go to Joe Luck across the street over there.”

Irv was horrified. “You mean the Chinks?”

At that moment the porch light winked on in the house behind him. The yellowish light caught the big man’s face, bronzing it like a statue. He nodded. “Import/export. Joe’s got connections with the big boys in Taiwan — and believe me, it isn’t just backscratchers he’s bringing in in those crates. But I happen to know he’s hard up for capital right now, and I think he’d jump at the chance—”

Irv cut him off. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But how do I know you’re the real thing? I mean, what proof do I have? Anybody could’ve talked to Alfred LaFarga.”

The big man snorted. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he fired up the chainsaw. Rrrrrrrrrow, it sang as he turned to the nearest tree and sent it home. Chips and sawdust flew off into the darkness as he guided the saw up and down, back and across, carving something in the bark, some message. Irv edged forward. Though the light was bad, he could just make out the jagged uppercase B, and then the E that followed it. When the big man reached the L, Irv anticipated him, but waited, arms folded, for the sequel. The stranger spelled out BELCHER, then sliced into the base of the tree; in the next moment the tree was toppling into the gloom with a shriek of clawing branches.

Irv waited till the growl of the saw died to a sputter. “Yeah?” he said. “So what does that prove?”

The big man merely grinned, his face hideous in the yellow light. Then he reached out and pressed his thumb to Irv’s forehead and Irv could hear the sizzle and feel the sting of his own flesh burning. “There’s my mark,” the stranger said. “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock. Don’t be late.” And then he strode off into the shadows, the great hulk of him halved in an instant, and then halved again, as if he were sinking down into the earth itself.

The first thing Tish said to him as he stepped in the door was “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been shouting myself hoarse. There’s an ambulance out front of the neighbor’s place.”

Irv shoved past her and parted the living-room curtains. Sure enough, there it was, red lights revolving and casting an infernal glow over the scene. There were voices, shouts, a flurry of people clustered round a stretcher and a pair of quick-legged men in hospital whites. “It’s nothing,” he said, a savage joy rising in his chest — it was true, true after all, and he was going to be rich—“just the old fart next door kicking off.”

Tish gave him a hard look. She was a year younger than he — his college sweetheart, in fact — but she’d let herself go. She wasn’t so much obese as muscular, big, broad-beamed — every inch her husband’s match. “What’s that on your forehead?” she asked, her voice pinched with suspicion.

He lifted his hand absently to the spot. The flesh seemed rough and abraded, raised in an annealed disc the size of a quarter. “Oh, this?” he said, feigning nonchalance. “Hit my head on the barbecue.”

She was having none of it. With a move so sudden it would have surprised a cat, she shot forward and seized his arm. “And what’s that I smell — Chinese food?” Her eyes leapt at him; her jaw clenched. “I suppose the enchiladas weren’t good enough for you, huh?”

He jerked his arm away. “Oh, yeah, I know — you really slaved over those enchiladas, didn’t you? Christ, you might have chipped a nail or something tearing the package open and shoving them in the microwave.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” she snarled, snatching his arm back and digging her nails in for emphasis. “The mark on your head, the Chinese food, that stupid grin on your face when you saw the ambulance — I know you. Something’s up, isn’t it?” She clung to his arm like some inescapable force of nature, like the tar in the La Brea pits or the undertow at Rockaway Beach. “Isn’t it?”

Irv Cherniske was not a man to confide in his wife. He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang. But this once, because the circumstances were so arresting and the stranger’s proposal so unique (not to mention final), he relented and let her in on his secret.

At first, she wouldn’t believe it. It was another of his lies, he was covering something up—devils: did he think she was born yesterday? But when she saw how solemn he was, how shaken, how feverish with lust over the prospect of laying his hands on the loot, she began to come around. By midnight she was urging him to go back and seal the bargain. “You fool. You idiot. What do you need twenty-four hours for? Go. Go now.”

Though Irv had every intention of doing just that — in his own time, of course — he wasn’t about to let her push him into anything. “You think I’m going to damn myself forever just to please you?” he sneered.

Tish took it for half a beat, then she sprang up from the sofa as if it were electrified. “All right,” she snapped. “I’ll find the son of a bitch myself and we’ll both roast — but I tell you I want those Krugerrands and all the rest of it too. And I want it now.”

A moment later, she was gone — out the back door and into the soft suburban night. Let her go, Irv thought in disgust, but despite himself he sat back to wait for her. For better than an hour he sat there in his mortgaged living room, dreaming of crushing his enemies and ascending the high-flown corridors of power, envisioning the cut-glass decanter in the bar of the Rolls and breakfast on the yacht, but at last he found himself nodding and decided to call it a day. He rose, stretched, and then padded through the dining room and kitchen to the back porch. He swung open the door and halfheartedly called his wife’s name. There was no answer. He shrugged, retraced his steps, and wearily mounted the stairs to the bedroom: devil or no devil, he had a train to catch in the morning.

Tish was sullen at breakfast. She looked sorrowful and haggard and there were bits of twig and leaf caught in her hair. The boys bent silently over their caramel crunchies, waiflike in the khaki jerseys and oversized shorts they wore to camp. Irv studied his watch while gulping coffee. “Well,” he said, addressing his stone-faced wife, “any luck?”

At first she wouldn’t answer him. And when she did, it was in a voice so constricted with rage she sounded as if she were being throttled. Yes, she’d found the sorry son of a bitch, all right — after traipsing all over hell and back for half the night — and after all that he’d had the gall to turn his back on her. He wasn’t in the mood, he said. But if she were to come back at noon with a peace offering — something worth talking about, something to show she was serious — he’d see what he could do for her. That’s how he’d put it.

For a moment Irv was seized with jealousy and resentment — was she trying to cut him out, was that it? — but then he remembered how the stranger had singled him out, had come to him, and he relaxed. He had nothing to worry about. It was Tish. She just didn’t know how to bargain, that was all. Her idea of a give and take was to reiterate her demands, over and over, each time in a shriller tone than the last. She’d probably pushed and pushed till even the devil wouldn’t have her. “I’ll be home early,” he said, and then he was driving through a soft misting rain to the station.

It was past seven when finally he did get home. He pulled into the driveway and was surprised to see his sons sitting glumly on the front stoop, their legs drawn up under them, rain drooling steadily from the eaves. “Where’s your mother?” he asked, hurrying up the steps in alarm. The elder, Shane, a pudgy, startled-looking boy of eight, whose misfortune it was to favor Tish about the nose and eyes, began to whimper. “She, she never came back,” he blubbered, smearing snot across his lip.

Filled with apprehension — and a strange, airy exhilaration too: maybe she was gone, gone for good! — Irv dialed his mother. “Ma?” he shouted into the phone. “Can you come over and watch the kids? It’s Tish. She’s missing.” He’d no sooner set the phone down than he noticed the blank space on the wall above the sideboard. The painting was gone. He’d always hated the thing — a gloomy dark swirl of howling faces with the legend “Cancer Dreams” scrawled in red across the bottom, a small monstrosity Tish had insisted on buying when he could barely make the car payments — but it was worth a bundle, that much he knew. And the moment he saw that empty space on the wall he knew she’d taken it to the big man in the woods — but what else had she taken? While the boys sat listlessly before the TV with a bag of taco chips, he tore through the house. Her jewelry would have been the first thing to go, and he wasn’t surprised to see that it had disappeared, teak box and all. But in growing consternation he discovered that his coin collection was gone too, as were his fly rod and his hip waders and the bottle of V.S.O.P. he’d been saving for the World Series. The whole business had apparently been bundled up in the Irish-linen cloth that had shrouded the dining-room table for as long as he could remember.

Irv stood there a moment over the denuded table, overcome with grief and rage. She was cutting him out, the bitch. She and the big man were probably down there right now, dancing round a gaping black hole in the earth. Or worse, she was on the train to New York with every last Krugerrand of Belcher’s hoard, heading for the Caymans in a chartered yacht, hurtling out of Kennedy in a big 747, two huge, bursting, indescribably heavy trunks nestled safely in the baggage compartment beneath her. Irv rushed to the window. There were the woods: still, silent, slick with wet. He saw nothing but trees.

In the next instant, he was out the back door, down the grassy slope, and into the damp fastness of the woods. He’d forgotten all about the kids, his mother, the house at his back — all he knew was that he had to find Tish. He kicked through dead leaves and rotting branches, tore at the welter of grapevine and sumac that seemed to rise up like a barrier before him. “Tish!” he bawled.

The drizzle had turned to a steady, pelting rain. Irv’s face and hands were scratched and insect-bitten and the hair clung to his scalp like some strange species of mold. His suit — all four hundred bucks’ worth — was ruined. He was staggering through a stubborn tangle of briars, his mind veering sharply toward the homicidal end of the spectrum, when a movement up ahead made him catch his breath. Stumbling forward, he flushed a great black carrion bird from the bushes; as it rose silently into the darkening sky, he spotted the tablecloth. Still laden, it hung from the lower branches of a pocked and leprous oak. Irv looked round him cautiously. All was still, no sound but for the hiss of the rain in the leaves. He straightened up and lumbered toward the pale damp sack, thinking at least to recover his property.

No such luck. When he lifted the bundle down, he was disappointed by its weight; when he opened it, he was shocked to the roots of his hair. The tablecloth contained two things only: a bloody heart and a bloody liver. His own heart was beating so hard he thought his temples would burst; in horror he flung the thing to the ground. Only then did he notice that the undergrowth round the base of the tree was beaten down and trampled, as if a scuffle had taken place beneath it. There was a fandango of footprints in the mud and clumps of stiff black hair were scattered about like confetti — and wasn’t that blood on the bark of the tree?

“Irv,” murmured a voice at his back, and he whirled round in a panic. There he was, the big man, his swarthy features hooded in shadow. This time he was wearing a business suit in a muted gray check, a power-yellow tie, and an immaculate trenchcoat. In place of the chainsaw, he carried a shovel, which he’d flung carelessly over one shoulder. “Whoa,” he said, holding up a massive palm, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He took a step forward and Irv could see that he was grinning. “All’s I want to know is do we have a deal or not?”

“Where’s Tish?” Irv demanded, his voice quavering. But even as he spoke he saw the angry red welt running the length of the big man’s jaw and disappearing into the hair at his temple, and he knew.

The big man shrugged. “What do you care? She’s gone, that’s all that matters. Hey, no more of that nagging whiny voice, no more money down the drain on face cream and high heels — just think, you’ll never have to wake up again to that bitchy pout and those nasty red little eyes. You’re free, Irv. I did you a favor.”

Irv regarded the stranger with awe. Tish was no mean adversary, and judging from the look of the poor devil’s face, she’d gone down fighting.

The big man dropped his shovel to the ground and there was a clink of metal on metal. “Right here, Irv,” he whispered. “Half a million easy. Cash. Tax-free. And with my help you’ll watch it grow to fifty times that.”

Irv glanced down at the bloody tablecloth and then back up at the big man in the trenchcoat. A slow grin spread across his lips.

Coming to terms wasn’t so easy, however, and it was past dark before they’d concluded their bargain. At first the stranger had insisted on Irv’s going into one of the big Hollywood talent agencies, but when Irv balked, he said he figured the legal profession was just about as good — but you needed a degree for that, and begging Irv’s pardon, he was a bit old to be going back to school, wasn’t he? “Why can’t I stay where I am,” Irv countered, “—in stocks and bonds? With all this cash I could quit Tiller Ponzi and set up my own office.”

The big man scratched his chin and laid a thoughtful finger alongside his nose. “Yeah,” he murmured after a moment, “yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. But I like it. You could promise them thirty percent and then play the futures market and gouge them till they bleed.”

Irv came alive at the prospect. “Bleed ‘em dry,” he hooted. “I’ll scalp and bucket and buy off the CFTC investigators, and then I’ll set up an offshore company to hide the profits.” He paused, overcome with the beauty of it. “I’ll screw them right and left.” “Deal?” the devil said.

Irv took the big callused hand in his own. “Deal.”

Ten years later, Irv Cherniske was one of the wealthiest men in New York. He talked widows into giving him their retirement funds to invest in ironclad securities and sure bets, lost them four or five hundred thousand, and charged half that again in commissions. With preternatural luck his own investments paid off time and again and he eventually set up an inside-trading scheme that made guesswork superfluous. The police, of course, had been curious about Tish’s disappearance, but Irv showed them the grisly tablecloth and the crude hole in which the killer had no doubt tried to bury her, and they launched an intensive manhunt that dragged on for months but produced neither corpse nor perpetrator. The boys he shunted off to his mother’s, and when they were old enough, to a military school in Tangiers. Two months after his wife’s disappearance, the newspapers uncovered a series of ritual beheadings in Connecticut and dropped all mention of the “suburban ghoul,” as they’d dubbed Tish’s killer; a week after that, Tish was forgotten and Beechwood went back to sleep.

It was in the flush of his success, when he had everything he’d ever wanted — the yacht, the sweet and compliant young mistress, the pair of Rolls Corniches, and the houses in the Bahamas and Aspen, not to mention the new wing he’d added to the old homestead in Beechwood — that Irv began to have second thoughts about the deal he’d made. Eternity was a long time, yes, but when he’d met the stranger in the woods that night it had seemed a long way off too. Now he was in his fifties, heavier than ever, with soaring blood pressure and flat feet, and the end of his career in this vale of profits was drawing uncomfortably near. It was only natural that he should begin to cast about for a loophole.

And so it was that he returned to the church — not the Roman church, to which he’d belonged as a boy, but the Church of the Open Palm, Reverend Jimmy, Pastor. He came to Reverend Jimmy one rainy winter night with a fire in his gut and an immortal longing in his heart. He sat through a three-hour sermon in which Reverend Jimmy spat fire, spoke in tongues, healed the lame, and lectured on the sanctity of the one and only God — profit — and then distributed copies of the Reverend Jimmy Church-Sponsored Investment Guide with the chili and barbecue recipes on the back page.

After the service, Irv found his way to Reverend Jimmy’s office at the back of the church. He waited his turn among the other supplicants with growing impatience, but he reminded himself that the way to salvation lay through humility and forbearance. At long last he was ushered into the presence of the Reverend himself. “What can I do for you, brother?” Reverend Jimmy asked. Though he was from Staten Island, Reverend Jimmy spoke in the Alabama hog-farmer’s dialect peculiar to his tribe.

“I need help, Reverend,” Irv confessed, flinging himself down on a leather sofa worn smooth by the buttocks of the faithful.

Reverend Jimmy made a small pyramid of his fingers and leaned back in his adjustable chair. He was a youngish man — no older than thirty-five or so, Irv guessed — and he was dressed in a flannel shirt, penny loafers, and a plaid fishing hat that masked his glassy blue eyes. “Speak to me, brother,” he said.

Irv looked down at the floor, then shot a quick glance round the office — an office uncannily like his own, right down to the computer terminal, mahogany desk, and potted palms — and then whispered, “You’re probably not going to believe this.”

Reverend Jimmy lit himself a cigarette and shook out the match with a snap of his wrist. “Try me,” he drawled.

When Irv had finished pouring out his heart, Reverend Jimmy leaned forward with a beatific smile on his face. “Brother,” he said, “believe me, your story’s nothin’ new — I handle just as bad and sometimes worser ever day. Cheer up, brother: salvation is on the way!”

Then Reverend Jimmy made a number of pointed inquiries into Irv’s financial status and fixed the dollar amount of his tithe — to be paid weekly in small bills, no checks please. Next, with a practiced flourish, he produced a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the text of which was interspersed with biblical quotes in support of its guiding theses, and pronounced Irv saved. “You got your holy book,” the Reverend Jimmy boomed as Irv ducked gratefully out the door, “—y’all keep it with you ever day, through sleet and snow and dark of night, and old Satan he’ll be paarless against you.”

And so it was. Irv gained in years and gained in wealth. He tithed the Church of the Open Palm, and he kept the holy book with him at all times. One day, just after his sixtieth birthday, his son Shane came to the house to see him. It was a Sunday and the market was closed, but after an early-morning dalliance with Sushoo, his adept and oracular mistress, he’d placed a half dozen calls to Hong Kong, betting on an impending monsoon in Burma to drive the price of rice through the ceiling. He was in the Blue Room, as he liked to call the salon in the west wing, eating a bit of poached salmon and looking over a coded letter from Butram, his deep man in the SEC. The holy book lay on the desk beside him.

Shane was a bloated young lout in his late twenties, a sorrowful, shameless leech who’d flunked out of half a dozen schools and had never held a job in his life — unlike Morgan, who’d parlayed the small stake his father had given him into the biggest used-car dealership in the country. Unwashed, unshaven, the gut he’d inherited from his father peeping out from beneath a Hawaiian shirt so lurid it looked as if it had been used to stanch wounds at the emergency ward, Shane loomed over his father’s desk. “I need twenty big ones,” he grunted, giving his father a look of beery disdain. “Bad week at the track.”

Irv looked up from his salmon and saw Tish’s nose, Tish’s eyes, saw the greedy, worthless, contemptible slob his son had become. In a sudden rage he shot from the chair and hammered the desk so hard the plate jumped six inches. “I’ll be damned if I give you another cent,” he roared.

Just then there was a knock at the door. His face contorted with rage, Irv shoved past his son and stormed across the room, a curse on his lips for Magdalena, the maid, who should have known better than to bother him at a time like this. He tore open the door only to find that it wasn’t Magdalena at all, but his acquaintance of long ago, the big black man with the wild mane of hair and the vague odor of stir-fry on his clothes. “Time’s up, Irv,” the big man said gruffly. In vain did Irv look over his shoulder to where the Reverend Jimmy’s holy book sat forlorn on the desk beside the plate of salmon that was already growing cold. The big man took his arm in a grip of steel and whisked him through the hallway, down the stairs, and out across the lawn to where a black BMW with smoked windows sat running at the curb. Irv turned his pale fleshy face to the house and saw his son staring down at him from above, and then the big man laid an implacable hand on his shoulder and shoved him into the car.

The following day, of course, as is usual in these cases, all of Irv’s liquid assets — his stocks and bonds, his Swiss and Bahamian bankbooks, even the wads of new-minted hundred-dollar bills he kept stashed in safe-deposit boxes all over the country — turned to cinders. Almost simultaneously, the house was gutted by a fire of mysterious origin, and both Rolls-Royces were destroyed. Joe Luck, who shuffled out on his lawn in a silk dressing gown at the height of the blaze, claimed to have seen a great black bird emerge from the patch of woods behind the house and mount into the sky high above the roiling billows of steam and smoke, but for some reason, no one else seemed to have shared his vision.

The big refurbished house on Beechwood Drive has a new resident now, a corporate lawyer by the name of O’Faolain. If he’s bothered by the unfortunate history of the place — or even, for that matter, aware of it — no one can say. He knows his immediate neighbors as the Chinks, the Fat Family, and the Turf Builders. They know him as the Shyster.

(1987)

THE HUMAN FLY

In the early days, before the press took him up, his outfit was pretty basic: tights and cape, plastic swim goggles and a bathing cap in the brightest shade of red he could find. The tights were red too, though they’d faded to pink in the thighs and calves and had begun to sag around the knees. He wore a pair of scuffed hightops — red, of course — and the cape, which looked as if it had last been used to line a trash can, was the color of poached salmon. He seemed to be in his thirties, though I never did find out how old he was, and he was thin, skinny, emaciated — so wasted you worried about his limbs dropping off. When he limped into the office that first afternoon, I didn’t know what to think. If he brought an insect to mind, it was something spindly and frail — a daddy longlegs or one of those spidery things that scoot across the surface of the pool no matter how much chlorine the pool man dumps in.

“A gentleman here to see you,” Crystal sang through the intercom.

My guard was down. I was vulnerable. I admit it. Basking in the glow of my first success (ten percent of a walk-on for Bettina Buttons, a nasally inflected twelve-year-old with pushy parents, in a picture called Tyrannosaurus II—no lines, but she did manage a memorable screech) and bloated with a celebratory lunch, I was feeling magnanimous, large-spirited, and saintly. Of course, the two splits of Sangre de Cristo, 1978, might have had something to do with it. I hit the button on the intercom. “Who is it?”

“Your name, sir?” I heard Crystal ask, and then, through the crackle of static, I heard him respond in the peculiar unmodulated rumble he associated with speech.

“Pardon?” Crystal said.

“La Mosca Humana,” he rumbled.

Crystal leaned into the intercom. “Uh, I think he’s Mexican or something.”

At that stage in my career, I had exactly three clients, all inherited from my predecessor: the aforementioned Bettina; a comic with a harelip who did harelip jokes only; and a soft-rock band called Mu, who believed they were reincarnated court musicians from the lost continent of Atlantis. The phone hadn’t rung all morning and my next (and only) appointment, with Bettina’s mother, grandmother, acting coach, and dietician, was at seven. “Show him in,” I said grandly.

The door pushed open, and there he was. He drew himself up with as much dignity as you could expect from a grown man in a red bathing cap and pink tights, and hobbled into the office. I took in the cap, the cape, the hightops and tights, the slumped shoulders and fleshless limbs. He wore a blond mustache, droopy and unkempt, the left side of his face was badly bruised, and his nose looked as if it had been broken repeatedly — and recently. The fluorescent light glared off his goggles.

My first impulse was to call security — he looked like one of those panhandling freaks out on Hollywood Boulevard — but I resisted it. As I said, I was full of wine and feeling generous. Besides, I was so bored I’d spent the last half-hour crumpling up sheets of high-fiber bond and shooting three-pointers into the wastebasket. I nodded. He nodded back. “So,” I said, “what can I do for you, Mr., ah—?”

“Mosca,” he rumbled, the syllables thick and muffled, as if he were trying to speak and clear his throat at the same time. “La Mosca Humana.”

“The Human Fly, right?” I said, dredging up my high-school Spanish.

He looked down at the desk and then fixed his eyes on mine. “I want to be famous,” he said.

How he found his way to my office, I’ll never know. I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t somebody’s idea of a joke. In those days, I was nothing — I had less seniority than the guy who ran the Xerox machine — and my office was the smallest and farthest from the door of any in the agency. I was expected to get by with two phone lines, one secretary, and a workspace not much bigger than a couple of good-sized refrigerator boxes. There were no Utrillos or Demuths on my walls. I didn’t even have a window.

I understood that the man hovering over my desk was a nut case, but there was more to it than that. I could see that he had something — a dignity, a sad elemental presence — that gave the lie to his silly outfit. I felt uneasy under his gaze. “Don’t we all,” I said.

“No, no,” he insisted, “you don’t understand,” and he pulled a battered manila envelope from the folds of his cape. “Here,” he said, “look.”

The envelope contained his press clippings, a good handful of them, yellowed and crumbling, bleached of print. All but one were in Spanish. I adjusted the desk lamp, squinted hard. The datelines were from places like Chetumal, Tuxtla, Hidalgo, Tehuantepec. As best I could make out, he’d been part of a Mexican circus. The sole clipping in English was from the “Metro” section of the Los Angeles Times: MAN ARRESTED FOR SCALING ARCO TOWER.

I read the first line—“A man known only as “The Human Fly’ “—and I was hooked. What a concept: a man known only as the Human Fly! It was priceless. Reading on, I began to see him in a new light: the costume, the limp, the bruises. This was a man who’d climbed twenty stories with nothing more than a couple pieces of rope and his fingernails. A man who defied the authorities, defied death — my mind was doing backflips; we could run with this one, oh, yes, indeed. Forget your Rambos and Conans, this guy was the real thing.

“Five billion of us monkey on the planet,” he said in his choked, moribund tones, “I want to make my mark.”

I looked up in awe. I saw him on Carson, Letterman, grappling his way to the top of the Bonaventure Hotel, hurtling Niagara in a barrel, starring in his own series. I tried to calm myself. “Uh, your face,” I said, and I made a broad gesture that took in the peach-colored bruise, the ravaged nose and stiffened leg, “what happened?”

For the first time, he smiled. His teeth were stained and ragged; his eyes flared behind the cracked plastic lenses of the goggles. “An accident,” he said.

As it turned out, he wasn’t Mexican at all — he was Hungarian. I saw my mistake when he peeled back the goggles and bathing cap. A fine band of skin as blanched and waxen as the cap of a mushroom outlined his ears, his hairline, the back of his neck, dead-white against the sun-burnished oval of his face. His eyes were a pale watery blue and the hair beneath the cap was as wispy and colorless as the strands of his mustache. His name was Zoltan Mindszenty, and he’d come to Los Angeles to live with his uncle when the Russian tanks rolled through Budapest in 1956. He’d learned English, Spanish and baseball, practiced fire-eating and tightrope-walking in his spare time, graduated at the top of his high-school class, and operated a forklift in a cannery that produced refried beans and cactus salad. At the age of nineteen he joined the Quesadilla Brothers’ Circus and saw the world. Or at least that part of it bounded by California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to the north and Belize and Guatemala to the south. Now he wanted to be famous.

He moved fast. Two days after I’d agreed to represent him he made the eyewitness news on all three major networks when he suspended himself in a mesh bag from the twenty-second floor of the Sumitomo Building and refused to come down.

Terrific. The only problem was that he didn’t bother to tell me about it. I was choking down a quick salad lunch — avocado and sprouts on a garlic-cheese croissant — already running late for an audition I’d set up for my harelipped comedian — when the phone rang. It was a Lieutenant Peachtree of the LAPD. “Listen,” the lieutenant hissed, “if this is a publicity stunt …” and he trailed off, leaving the threat — heavy ire, the violation of penal codes, the arcane and merciless measures taken to deal with accessories — unspoken.

“Pardon?”

“The nutball up on the Sumitomo Building. Your client.”

Comprehension washed over me. My first thought was to deny the connection, but instead I found myself stammering, “But, but how did you get my name?”

Terse and efficient, a living police report, Peachtree gave me the details. One of his men, hanging out of a window on the twenty-first floor, had pleaded with Zoltan to come down. “I am the Human Fly,” Zoltan rumbled in response as the wind snapped and the traffic sizzled below, “you want to talk to me, call my agent.”

“Twenty minutes,” Peachtree added, and his tone was as flat and unforgiving as the drop of a guillotine, “I want you down here. Five minutes after that I want this clown in the back of the nearest patrol car — is that understood?”

It was. Perfectly. And twenty minutes later, with the help of an Officer Dientes, a screaming siren, and several hundred alert motorists who fell away from us on the freeway like swatted flies, I was taking the breeze on the twenty-first floor of the Sumitomo Building. Two of Peachtree’s men gripped my legs and eased my torso out onto the slick grassy plane of the building’s façade.

I was sick with fear. Before me lay the immensity of the city, its jaws and molars exposed. Above was the murky sky, half a dozen pigeons on a ledge, and Zoltan, bundled up like a sack of grapefruit and calmly perusing a paperback thriller. I choked back the remains of the croissant and cleared my throat. “Zoltan!” I shouted, the wind snatching the words from my lips and flinging them away. “Zoltan, what are you doing up there?”

There was a movement from the bag above me, Zoltan stirring himself like a great leathery fruit bat unfolding its wings, and then his skinny legs and outsized feet emerged from their confinement as the bag swayed gently in the breeze. He peered down at me, the goggles aflame with the sun, and gave me a sour look. “You’re supposed to be my agent, and you have to ask me that?”

“It’s a stunt, then — is that it?” I shouted.

He turned his face away, and the glare of the goggles died. He wouldn’t answer me. Behind me, I could hear Peachtree’s crisp, efficient tones: “Tell him he’s going to jail.”

“They’re going to lock you up. They’re not kidding.”

For a long moment, he didn’t respond. Then the goggles caught the sun again and he turned to me. “I want the TV people, Tricia Toyota, ‘Action News,’ the works.”

I began to feel dizzy. The pavement below, with its toy cars and its clots of tiny people, seemed to rush up at me and recede again in a pulsing wave. I felt Peachtree’s men relax their grip. “They won’t come!” I gasped, clutching the windowframe so desperately my fingers went numb. “They can’t. It’s network policy.” It was true, as far as I knew. Every flake in the country would be out on that ledge if they thought they could get a ten-second clip on the evening news.

Zoltan was unimpressed. “TV,” he rumbled into the wind, “or I stay here till you see the white of my bone.”

I believed him.

As it turned out, he stayed there, aloft, for two weeks. And for some reason — because he was intractable, absurd, mad beyond hope or redemption — the press couldn’t get enough of it. TV included. How he passed the time, what he ate, how he relieved himself, no one knew. He was just a presence, a distant speck in a mesh sack, the faintest intrusion of reality on the clear smooth towering face of the Sumitomo Building. Peachtree tried to get him down, of course — harassing him with helicopters, sending a squad of window cleaners, firemen, and lederhosen up after him — but nothing worked. If anyone got close to him, Zoltan would emerge from his cocoon, cling to the seamless face of the building, and float — float like a big red fly — to a new position.

Finally, after the two weeks were up — two weeks during which my phone never stopped ringing, by the way — he decided to come down. Did he climb in the nearest window and take the elevator? No, not Zoltan. He backed down, inch by inch, uncannily turning up finger- and toe-holds where none existed. He sprang the last fifteen feet to the ground, tumbled like a sky diver, and came up in the grip of a dozen policemen. There was a barricade up, streets were blocked, hundreds of spectators had gathered. As they were hustling him to a patrol car, the media people converged on him. Was it a protest? they wanted to know. A hunger strike? What did it mean?

He turned to them, the goggles steamed over, pigeon feathers and flecks of airborne debris clinging to his cape. His legs were like sticks, his face nearly black with sun and soot. “I want to be famous,” he said.

“A DC-10?”

Zoltan nodded. “The bigger, the better,” he rumbled.

It was the day after he’d decamped from the face of the Sumitomo Building and we were in my office, discussing the next project. (I’d bailed him out myself, though the figure was right up there with what you’d expect for a serial killer. There were fourteen charges against him, ranging from trespassing to creating a public nuisance and refusing the reasonable request of a police officer to indecent exposure. I had to call in every favor that was ever owed to me and go down on my knees to Sol Bankoff, the head of the agency, to raise the cash.) Zoltan was wearing the outfit I’d had specially made for him: new tights, a black silk cape without a wrinkle in it, a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes in red and black, and most important of all, a red leather aviator’s cap and goggles. Now he looked less like a geriatric at a health spa and more like the sort of fearless daredevil/superhero the public could relate to.

“But Zoltan,” I pleaded, “those things go five hundred miles an hour. You’d be ripped to pieces. Climbing buildings is one thing, but this is insane. It’s suicidal.”

He was slouched in the chair, one skinny leg thrown over the other. “The Human Fly can survive anything,” he droned in his lifeless voice. He was staring at the floor, and now he lifted his head. “Besides, you think the public have any respect for me if I don’t lay it all on line?”

He had a point. But strapping yourself to the wing of a DC-10 made about as much sense as taking lunch at a sidewalk cafe in Beirut. “Okay,” I said, “you’re right. But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. What good’s it going to do you to be famous if you’re dead?”

Zoltan shrugged.

“I mean already, just with the Sumitomo thing, I can book you on half the talk shows in the country….”

He rose shakily to his feet, lifted his hand, and let it drop. Two weeks on the face of the Sumitomo Building with no apparent source of nourishment hadn’t done him any good. If he was skinny before, he was nothing now — a shadow, a ghost, a pair of tights stuffed with straw. “Set it up,” he rumbled, the words riding up out of the depths of his sunken abdomen, “I talk when I got something to talk about.”

It took me a week. I called every airline in the directory, listened to a lifetime’s worth of holding jingles, and talked to everyone from the forklift operator at KLM to the president and CEO of Texas Air. I was met by scorn, hostility, disbelief, and naked contempt. Finally I got hold of the schedules manager of Aero Masoquisto, the Ecuadorian national airline. It was going to cost me, he said, but he could hold up the regular weekly flight to Quito for a few hours while Zoltan strapped himself to the wing and took a couple passes round the airport. He suggested an airstrip outside Tijuana, where the officials would look the other way. For a price, of course.

Of course.

I went to Sol again. I was prepared to press my forehead to the floor, shine his shoes, anything — but he surprised me. “I’ll front the money,” he rasped, his voice ruined from forty years of whispering into the telephone, “no problem.” Sol was seventy, looked fifty, and he’d had his own table in the Polo Lounge since before I was born. “If he bags it,” he said, his voice as dry as a husk, “we got the rights to his life story and we’ll do a paperback/miniseries/action-figure tie-in. Just get him to sign this, that’s all.” He slid a contract across the table. “And if he makes it, which I doubt — I mean I’ve seen some crazies in my time, but this guy is something else — if he makes it, we’ll have a million and a half offers for him. Either way, we make out, right?”

“Right,” I said, but I was thinking of Zoltan, his brittle limbs pressed to the unyielding metal, the terrible pull of the G-forces, and the cyclonic blast of the wind. What chance did he have?

Sol cleared his throat, shook a few lozenges into his fist, and rattled the’m like dice. “Your job,” he said, “is to make sure the press shows up. No sense in this nimrod bagging it for nothing, right?”

I felt something clench in my gut.

Sol repeated himself, “Right?”

“Right,” I said.

Zoltan was in full regalia as we boarded the plane at LAX, along with a handful of reporters and photographers and a hundred grim-looking Ecuadorians with plastic bags full of disposable diapers, cosmetics, and penlight batteries. The plan was for the pilot to announce a minor problem — a clogged air-conditioning vent or a broken handle in the flush toilet; we didn’t want to panic anybody — and an unscheduled stop to repair it. Once on the ground, the passengers would be asked to disembark and we’d offer them free drinks in the spacious terminal while the plane taxied out of sight and Zoltan did his thing.

Problem was, there was no terminal. The landing strip looked as if it had been bombed during the Mexican Revolution, it was a hundred degrees inside the airplane and 120 out on the asphalt, and all I could see was heat haze and prickly-pear cactus. “What do you want to do?” I asked Zoltan.

Zoltan turned to me, already fumbling with his chin strap. “It’s perfect,” he whispered, and then he was out in the aisle, waving his arms and whistling for the passengers’ attention. When they quieted down, he spoke to them in Spanish, the words coming so fast you might have thought he was a Mexican disc jockey, his voice riding on a current of emotion he never approached in English. I don’t know what he said — he could have been exhorting them to hijack the plane, for all I knew — but the effect was dramatic. When he finished, they rose to their feet and cheered.

With a flourish, Zoltan threw open the emergency exit over the wing and began his preparations. Flashbulbs popped, reporters hung out the door and shouted questions at him — Had this ever been attempted before? Did he have his will made out? How high was he planning to go? — and the passengers pressed their faces to the windows. I’d brought along a TV crew to capture the death-defying feat for syndication, and they set up one camera on the ground while the other shot through the window.

Zoltan didn’t waste any time. He buckled what looked like a huge leather truss around the girth of the wing, strapped himself into the pouch attached to it, tightened his chin strap a final time, and then gave me the thumbs-up sign. My heart was hammering. A dry wind breathed through the open window. The heat was like a fist in my face. “You’re sure you want to go through with this?” I yelled.

“One hundred percent, A-OK,” Zoltan shouted, grinning as the reporters crowded round me in the narrow passageway, Then the pilot said something in Spanish and the flight attendants pulled the window shut, fastened the bolts, and told us to take our seats. A moment later the big engines roared to life and we were hurtling down the runway. I could barely stand to look. At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers. I felt the wheels lift off, heard a shout from the passengers, and there he was — Zoltan — clinging to the trembling thunderous wing like a second coat of paint.

It was a heady moment, transcendent, the camera whirring, the passengers cheering, Zoltan’s greatness a part of us all. This was an event, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, like watching Hank Aaron stroke his seven hundred fifteenth homer or Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the moon. We forgot the heat, forgot the roar of the engines, forgot ourselves. He’s doing it, I thought, he’s actually doing it. And I truly think he would have pulled it off, if — well, it was one of those things no one could have foreseen. Bad luck, that’s all.

What happened was this: just as the pilot was coming in for his final approach, a big black bird — a buzzard, somebody said — loomed up out of nowhere and slammed into Zoltan with a thump that reverberated throughout the plane. The whole thing took maybe half a second. This black bundle appears, there’s a thump, and next thing Zoltan’s goggles are gone and he’s covered from head to toe in raw meat and feathers.

A gasp went through the cabin. Babies began to mewl, grown men burst into tears, a nun fainted. My eyes were riveted on Zoltan. He lay limp in his truss while the hot air sliced over the wing, and the jagged yellow mountains, the prickly pear, and the pocked landing strip rushed past him like the backdrop of an old movie. The plane was still rolling when we threw open the emergency exit and staggered out onto the wing. The copilot was ahead of me, a reporter on my heels. “Zoltan!” I cried, scared and sick and trembling. “Zoltan, are you all right?”

There was no answer. Zoltan’s head lolled against the flat hard surface of the wing and his eyes were closed, sunk deep behind the wrinkled flaps of his lids. There was blood everywhere. I bent to tear at the straps of the aviator’s cap, my mind racing, thinking alternately of mouth-to-mouth and the medical team I should have thought to bring along, when an urgent voice spoke at my back. “Perdóneme, perdóneme, I yam a doaktor.”

One of the passengers, a wizened little man in Mickey Mouse T-shirt and Bermudas, knelt over Zoltan, shoving back his eyelids and feeling for his pulse. There were shouts behind me. The wing was as hot as the surface of a frying pan. “Jes, I yam getting a pulse,” the doctor announced and then Zoltan winked open an eye. “Hey,” he rumbled, “am I famous yet?”

Zoltan was right: the airplane stunt fired the imagination of the country. The wire services picked it up, the news magazines ran stories — there was even a bit on the CBS evening news. A week later the National Enquirer was calling him the reincarnation of Houdini and the Star was speculating about his love life. I booked him on the talk-show circuit, and while he might not have had much to say, he just about oozed charisma. He appeared on the Carson show in his trademark outfit, goggles and all, limping and with his arm in a sling (he’d suffered a minor concussion, a shoulder separation, and a fractured kneecap when the bird hit him). Johnny asked him what it was like out there on the wing and Zoltan said: “Loud.” And what was it like spending two weeks on the face of the Sumitomo Building? “Boring,” Zoltan rumbled. But Carson segued into a couple of airline jokes (“Have you heard the new slogan for China Airlines?” Pause. “You’ve seen us drive, now watch us fly”) and the audience ate it up. Offers poured in from promoters, producers, book editors, and toy manufacturers. I was able to book David Mugillo, my hare-lipped comedian, on Zoltan’s coattails, and when we did the Carson show we got Bettina Buttons on for three minutes of nasal simpering about Tyrannosaurus II and how educational an experience it was for her to work with such a sensitive and caring director as so-and-so.

Zoltan had arrived.

A week after his triumph on “The Tonight Show” he hobbled into the office, the cape stained and torn, tights gone in the knees. He brought a distinctive smell with him — the smell of pissed-over gutters and fermenting dumpsters — and for the first time I began to understand why he’d never given me an address or a phone number. (“You want me,” he said, “leave a message with Ramon at Jiffy Cleaners.”) All at once I had a vision of him slinging his grapefruit sack from the nearest drainpipe and curling up for the night. “Zoltan,” I said, “are you okay? You need some cash? A place to stay?”

He sat heavily in the chair across from me. Behind him, on the wall, was an oil painting of an open window, a gift from Mu’s bass player. Zoltan waved me off. Then, with a weary gesture, he reached up and removed the cap and goggles. I was shocked. His hair was practically gone and his face was as seamed and scarred as an old hockey puck. He looked about a hundred and twelve. He said nothing.

“Well,” I said, to break the silence, “you got your wish. You made it.” I lifted a stack of correspondence from the desk and waved it at him. “You’re famous.”

Zoltan turned his head and spat on the floor. “Famous,” he mocked. “Fidel Castro is famous. Irving Berlin. Evel Knievel.” His rumble had turned bitter. “Peterbilt,” he said suddenly.

This last took me by surprise. I’d been thinking of consolatory platitudes, and all I could do was echo him weakly: “Peterbilt?”

“I want the biggest rig going. The loudest, the dirtiest.”

I wasn’t following him.

“Maine to L.A.,” he rumbled.

“You’re going to drive it?”

He stood shakily, fought his way back into the cap, and lowered the goggles. “Shit,” he spat, “I ride the axle.”

I tried to talk him out of it. “Think of the fumes,” I said, “the road hazards. Potholes, dead dogs, mufflers. You’ll be two feet off the pavement, going seventy-five, eighty miles an hour. Christ, a cardboard box’ll tear you apart.”

He wouldn’t listen. Not only was he going through with it, but he wanted to coordinate it so that he ended up in Pasadena, for the swap meet at the Rose Bowl. There he would emerge from beneath the truck, wheel a motorcycle out of the back, roar up a ramp, and sail over twenty-six big rigs lined up fender to fender in the middle of the parking lot.

I asked Sol about it. Advance contracts had already made back the money he’d laid out for the airplane thing ten times over. And now we could line up backers. “Get him to wear a Pirelli patch on his cape,” Sol rasped, “it’s money in the bank.”

Easy for Sol to say, but I was having problems with the whole business. This wasn’t a plastic dinosaur on a movie lot or a stinko audience at the Improv, this was flesh and blood we were talking about here, a human life. Zoltan wasn’t healthy — in mind or body. The risks he took weren’t healthy. His ambition wasn’t healthy. And if I went along with him, I was no better than Sol, a mercenary, a huckster who’d watch a man die for ten percent of the action. For a day or two I stayed away from the office, brooding around the kitchen in my slippers. In the end, though, I talked myself into it — Zoltan was going to do it with or without me. And who knew what kind of bloodsucker he’d wind up with next?

I hired a PR firm, got a major trucking company to carry him for the goodwill and free publicity, and told myself it was for the best. I’d ride in the cab with the driver, keep him awake, watch over Zoltan personally. And of course I didn’t know how it was going to turn out — Zoltan was amazing, and if anyone could pull it off, he could — and I thought of the Sumitomo Building and Aero Masoquisto and hoped for the best.

We left Bangor in a cold drizzle on a morning that could have served as the backdrop for a low-budget horror picture: full-bellied clouds, gloom, mist, nose-running cold. By the time we reached Portland the drizzle had begun to crust on the windshield wipers; before we reached New Hampshire it was sleet. The driver was an American Indian by the name of Mink — no middle name, no surname, just Mink. He weighed close to five hundred pounds and he wore his hair in a single braided coil that hung to his belt loops in back. The other driver, whose name was Steve, was asleep in the compartment behind the cab. “Listen, Mink,” I said, the windshield wipers beating methodically at the crust, tires hissing beneath us, “maybe you should pull over so we can check on Zoltan.”

Mink shifted his enormous bulk in the seat. “What, the Fly?” he said. “No sweat. That guy is like amazing. I seen that thing with the airplane. He can survive that, he’s got no problem with this rig — long’s I don’t hit nothin’.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when an animal — a huge brown thing like a cow on stilts — materialized out of the mist. Startled, Mink jerked the wheel, the truck went into a skid, there was a jolt like an earthquake, and the cow on stilts was gone, sucked under the front bumper like a scrap of food sucked down a drain. When we finally came to a stop a hundred yards up the road, the trailer was perpendicular to the cab and Mink’s hands were locked to the wheel.

“What happened?” I said.

“Moose,” Mink breathed, adding a soft breathless curse. “We hit a fuckin’ moose.”

In the next instant I was down and out of the cab, racing the length of the trailer, and shouting Zoltan’s name. Earlier, in the cold dawn of Bangor, I’d watched him stretch out his mesh bag and suspend it like a trampoline from the trailer’s undercarriage, just ahead of the rear wheels. He’d waved to the reporters gathered in the drizzle, ducked beneath the trailer, and climbed into the bag. Now, my heart banging, I wondered what a moose might have done to so tenuous an arrangement. “Zoltan!” I shouted, going down on my knees to peer into the gloom beneath the trailer.

There was no moose. Zoltan’s cocoon was still intact, and so was he. He was lying there on his side, a thin fetal lump rounding out of the steel and grime. “What?” he rumbled.

I asked him the question I always seemed to be asking him: was he all right?

It took him a moment — he was working his hand free — and then he gave me the thumbs-up sign. “A-OK,” he said.

The rest of the trip — through the icy Midwest, the wind-torn Rockies, and the scorching strip between Tucson and Gila Bend — was uneventful. For me, anyway. I alternately slept, ate truckstop fare designed to remove the lining of your stomach, and listened to Mink or Steve — their conversation was interchangeable — rhapsodize about Harleys, IROC Camaros, and women who went down on all fours and had “Truckers’ Delite” tattooed across their buttocks. For Zoltan, it was business as usual. If he suffered from the cold, the heat, the tumbleweeds, beer cans, and fast-food containers that ricocheted off his poor lean scrag of a body day and night, he never mentioned it. True to form, he refused food and drink, though I suspected he must have had something concealed in his cape, and he never climbed down out of his cocoon, not even to move his bowels. Three days and three nights after we’d left Maine, we wheeled the big rig through the streets of Pasadena and into the parking lot outside the Rose Bowl, right on schedule.

There was a fair-sized crowd gathered, though there was no telling whether they’d come for the swap meet, the heavy-metal band we’d hired to give some punch to Zoltan’s performance, or the stunt itself, but then who cared? They were there. As were the “Action News” team, the souvenir hawkers and hot-dog vendors. Grunting, his face beaded with sweat, Mink guided the truck into place alongside the twenty-five others, straining to get it as close as possible: an inch could mean the difference between life and death for Zoltan, and we all knew it.

I led a knot of cameramen to the rear of the truck so they could get some tape of Zoltan crawling out of his grapefruit bag. When they were all gathered, he stirred himself, shaking off the froth of insects and road grime, the scraps of paper and cellophane, placing first one bony foot and then the other on the pavement. His eyes were feverish behind the lenses of the goggles and when he lurched out from under the truck I had to catch his arm to prevent him from falling. “So how does it feel to conquer the roadways?” asked a microphone-jabbing reporter with moussed hair and flawless teeth. “What was the worst moment?” asked another.

Zoltan’s legs were rubber. He reeked of diesel fuel, his cape was in tatters, his face smeared with sweat and grease. “Twenty-six truck,” he rumbled. “The Human Fly is invincible.”

And then the band started in — smokebombs, megadecibels, subhuman screeches, the works — and I led Zoltan to his dressing room. He refused a shower, but allowed the makeup girl to sponge off his face and hands. We had to cut the old outfit off him — he was too exhausted to undress himself — and then the girl helped him into the brand-new one I’d provided for the occasion. “Twenty-six truck,” he kept mumbling to himself, “A-OK.”

I wanted him to call it off. I did. He wasn’t in his right mind, anybody could see that. And he was exhausted, beat, as starved and helpless as a refugee. He wouldn’t hear of it. “Twenty-six truck,” he rumbled, and when I put through a frantic last-minute call to Sol, Sol nearly swallowed the phone. “Damn straight he’s going for it!” he shouted. “We got sponsors lined up here. ABC Sports wants to see the tape, for christsake.” There was an outraged silence punctuated by the click of throat lozenges, and then Sol cut the connection.

Ultimately, Zoltan went for it. Mink threw open the trailer door, Zoltan fired up the motorcycle — a specially modified Harley Sportster with gas shocks and a bored engine — and one of our people signaled the band to cut it short. The effect was dynamic, the band cutting back suddenly to a punchy drum-and-bass thing and the growl of the big bike coming on in counterpoint … and then Zoltan sprang from the back of the trailer, his cape stiff with the breeze, goggles flashing, tires squealing. He made three circuits of the lot, coming in close on the line of trucks, dodging away from the ramp, hunched low and flapping over the handlebars. Every eye was on him. Suddenly he raised a bony fist in the air, swerved wide of the trucks in a great arcing loop that took him to the far end of the lot, and made a run for the ramp.

He was a blur, he was nothing, he was invisible, a rush of motion above the scream of the engine. I saw something — a shadow — launch itself into the thick brown air, cab after cab receding beneath it, the glint of chrome in the sun, fifteen trucks, twenty, twenty-five, and then the sight that haunts me to this day. Suddenly the shadow was gone and a blemish appeared on the broad side panel of the last truck, the one we’d taken across country, Mink’s truck, and then, simultaneous with it, there was the noise. A single booming reverberation, as if the world’s biggest drum had exploded, followed by the abrupt cessation of the motorcycle’s roar and the sad tumbling clatter of dissociated metal.

We had medical help this time, of course, the best available: paramedics, trauma teams, ambulances. None of it did any good. When I pushed through the circle of people around him, Zoltan was lying there on the pavement like a bundle of broken twigs. The cape was twisted round his neck, and his limbs — the sorry fleshless sticks of his arms and legs — were skewed like a doll’s. I bent over him as the paramedics brought up the stretcher. “Twenty-five truck next time,” he whispered, “promise me.” There was blood in his ears, his nostrils, his eye sockets. “Yes,” I said, “yes. Twenty-five.”

“No worries,” he choked as they slid the stretcher under him, “the Human Fly … can survive … anything.”

We buried him three days later.

It was a lonely affair, as funerals go. The uncle, a man in his seventies with the sad scrawl of time on his face, was the only mourner. The press stayed away, though the videotape of Zoltan’s finale was shown repeatedly over the air and the freeze-frame photos appeared in half the newspapers in the country. I was shaken by the whole thing. Sol gave me a week off and I did some soul-searching. For a while I thought of giving up the entertainment business altogether, but I was pulled back into it despite myself. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a piece of Zoltan. And as I sat down to sort through the letters, telegrams, and urgent callback messages, the phone ringing unceasingly, the sun flooding the windows of my new well-appointed and highflown office, I began to realize that I owed it to Zoltan to pursue them. This was what he’d wanted, after all.

We settled finally on the animated series, with the usual tie-ins. I knew the producer — Sol couldn’t say enough about him — and I knew he’d do quality work. Sure enough, the show premiered number one in its timeslot and it’s been there ever since. Sometimes I’ll get up early on a Saturday morning just to tune in, to watch the jerky figures move against a backdrop of greed and corruption, the Human Fly ascendant, incorruptible, climbing hand over hand to the top.

(1988)

ON FOR THE LONG HAUL

There was nothing wrong with his appendix — no stitch in the side, no inflammation, no pain — but Bayard was having it out. For safety’s sake. He’d read an article once about an anthropologist who’d gone to Malaysia to study the social habits of the orangutan and died horribly when her appendix had burst three hundred miles from the nearest hospital; as she lay writhing in her death agony the distraught apes had hauled her halfway up a jackfruit tree, where she was found several days later by a photographer from Life magazine. The picture — splayed limbs, gouty face, leaves like a mouthful of teeth — was indelible with him. She’d been unprepared, that anthropologist, inattentive to the little details that can make or break you. Bayard was taking no such chances.

At their first meeting, the surgeon had been skeptical. “You’re going to Montana, Mr. Wemp, not Borneo. There are hospitals there, all the modern facilities.”

“It’s got to go, doctor,” Bayard had quietly insisted, looking up with perfect composure from the knot of his folded hands.

“Listen, Mr. Wemp. I’ve got to tell you that every surgical procedure, however routine, involves risk”—the doctor paused to let this sink in—“and I really feel the risks outweigh the gains in this case. All the tests are negative — we have no indication of a potential problem here.”

“But doctor—” Bayard felt himself at a loss for words. How explain to this earnest, assured man with the suntanned wife, the Mercedes, and the house in Malibu that all of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York — civilization itself — was on the brink of a catastrophe that would make the Dark Ages look like a Sunday-afternoon softball game? How intimate the horrors that lay ahead, the privation, the suffering? He remembered Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Some would be prepared, others would not. “You just don’t understand how isolated I’m going to be,” he said finally.

Isolated, yes. Thirty-five acres in Bounceback, Montana, population thirty-seven. The closest town with a hospital, bank, or restaurant was Missoula, a two-and-a-half-hour drive, an hour of it on washboard dirt. Bayard would have his own well, a cleared acre for vegetable farming, and a four-room cabin with wood stove, electrical generator, and a radiation-proof cellar stocked with a five-year supply of canned and freeze-dried foodstuffs. The whole thing was the brainchild of Sam Arkson, a real-estate developer who specialized in subsistence plots, bomb shelters, and survival homes. Bayard’s firm had done some PR work for one of Arkson’s companies — Thrive, Inc. — and as he looked into the literature of catastrophe, Bayard had found himself growing ever more uncertain about the direction of his own life. Remember the gas crisis? asked one of Arkson’s pamphlets. An inconvenience, right? The have-nots stepping on the haves. But what about the food crisis around the corner? Have you thought about what you’ll do when they close up the supermarkets with a sign that says “Sorry, Temporarily Out of Food”?

Bayard would never forget the day he’d come across that pamphlet. His palms had begun to sweat as he read on, gauging the effect of nuclear war on the food and water supply, thinking of life without toilet paper, toothpaste, or condiments, summoning images of the imminent economic depression, the starving masses, the dark-skinned marauding hordes pouring across our borders from the south to take, take, take with their greedy, desperate, clutching hands. That night he’d gone home in a cold sweat, visions of apocalypse dancing in his head. Fran made him a drink, but he couldn’t taste it. The girls showed him their schoolwork — the sweet, ingenuous loops of their penmanship, the pale water-colors and gold stars — and he felt the tears start up in his eyes. They were doomed, he was doomed, the world sinking like a stone. After they’d gone to bed he slipped out to the kitchen and silently pulled back the refrigerator door. Inside he found a head of deliquescing lettuce, half a gallon of milk, mayonnaise, mustard, chutney, a jar of capers so ancient it might have been unearthed in a tomb, a pint of butter-brickle ice cream, and a single Mexicali Belle TV dinner. The larder yielded two cans of pickled Chinese mushrooms, half a dozen packages of artificial rice pudding, and a lone box of Yodo Crunch cereal, three-quarters empty. He felt sick. Talk about a prolonged siege — they didn’t even have breakfast.

That night his dreams had tentacles. He woke feeling strangled. The coffee was poisonous, the newspaper rife with innuendo, each story, each detail cutting into him with the sharp edge of doom. A major quake was on the way, the hills were on fire, there was murder and mayhem in Hollywood, AIDS was spreading to the heterosexual population, Kaddafi had the bomb. Outside sat the traffic. Three million cars, creeping, spitting, killing the atmosphere, inching toward gridlock. The faces of the drivers were impassive. Shift, lurch, advance, stop, shift, lurch. Didn’t they know the whole world had gone hollow, rotten like a tooth? Didn’t they know they were dead? He looked into their eyes and saw empty sockets, looked into their faces and saw the death’s head. At work it was no better. The secretaries greeted him as if money mattered, as if there were time to breathe, go out to Chan Dara for lunch, and get felt up in the Xerox room; his colleagues were as bland as cue balls, nattering on about baseball, stocks, VCRs, and food processors. He staggered down the hallway as if he’d been hit in the vitals, slamming into the sanctuary of his office like a hunted beast. And there, on his desk, as if it were the bony pointed finger of the Grim Reaper himself, was Arkson’s pamphlet.

By two-thirty that afternoon he was perched on a chair in Sam Arkson’s San Diego office, talking hard-core survival with the impresario himself. Arkson sat behind a desk the size of a trampoline, looking alternately youthful and fissured with age — he could have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty. Aggressively tanned and conscientiously muscled, his hair cut so close to the scalp it might have been painted on, he resembled nothing so much as a professional sweat meister, Vic Tanny fighting the waistline bulge, Jack LaLanne with a Mohawk. He was dressed in fatigues and wore a khaki tie. “So,” he said, leaning back in his chair and sizing up Bayard with a shrewd, unforgiving gaze, “are you on for the long haul or do you just need a security blanket?”

Bayard was acutely conscious of his paunch, the whiteness of his skin, the hair that trailed down his neck in soft, frivolous coils. He felt like a green recruit under the burning gaze of the drill instructor, like an awkward dancer trying out for the wrong role. He coughed into his fist. “The long haul.”

Arkson seemed pleased. “Good,” he said, a faint smile playing across his lips. “I thought at first you might be one of these halfway types that wants a bomb shelter under the patio or something.” He gave Bayard a knowing glance. “They might last a month or two after the blast,” he said, “but what then? And what if it’s not war we’re facing but worldwide economic collapse? Are they going to eat their radiation detectors?”

This was a joke. Bayard laughed nervously. Arkson cut him off with a contemptuous snort and a wave of his hand that consigned all the timid, slipshod, halfway Harrys of the world to an early grave. “No,” he said, “I can see you’re the real thing, a one-hundred-percenter, no finger in the dike for you.” He paused. “You’re a serious person, Bayard, am I right?”

Bayard nodded.

“And you’ve got a family you want to protect?”

Bayard nodded again.

“Okay”—Arkson was on his feet, a packet of brochures in his hand—“we’re going to want to talk hidden location, with the space, seeds, fertilizer, and tools to grow food and the means to hunt it, and we’re going to talk a five-year renewable stockpile of survival rations, medical supplies, and specie — and of course weaponry.”

“Weaponry?”

Arkson had looked at him as if he’d just put a bag over his head. “Tell me,” he said, folding his arms so that the biceps swelled beneath his balled fists, “when the bust comes and you’re sitting on the only food supply in the county, you don’t really think your neighbors are going to breeze over for tea and polite chitchat, do you?”

Though Bayard had never handled a gun in his life, he knew the answer: there was a sickness on the earth and he’d have to harden himself to deal with it.

Suddenly Arkson was pointing at the ceiling, as if appealing to a higher authority to back him up. “You know what I’ve got up there on the roof?” he said, looming over Bayard like an inquisitor. Bayard hadn’t the faintest idea.

“A Brantley B2B.”

Bayard gave him a blank look.

“A chopper. Whirlybird. You know: upski-downski. And guess who flies it?” Arkson spread the brochures out on the desk in front of him, tapping a forefinger against the glossy photograph of a helicopter floating in a clear blue sky beneath the rubric ESCAPE CRAFT. “That’s right, friend: me. I fly it. Leave nothing to chance, that’s my motto.” Bayard thumbed through the brochure, saw mini-jets, hovercraft, Cessnas, seaplanes and ultralights.

“I can be out of town in ten minutes. Half an hour later I’m in my compound — two hundred fenced acres, three security men, goats, cows, chickens, pigs, corn as high as your chin, wheat, barley, rye, artesian wells, underground gas and water tanks — and an arsenal that could blow away the PLO. Listen,” he said, and his eyes were like a stalking cat’s, “when the shit hits the fan they’ll be eating each other out there.”

Bayard had been impressed. He was also terrified, sick with the knowledge of his own impotence and vulnerability. The blade was poised. It could fall today, tonight, tomorrow. They had to get out. “Fran,” he called as he hurried through the front door, arms laden with glossy brochures, dire broadsides, and assorted survival tomes from Arkson Publications, Ltd. “Fran!”

Fran had always been highstrung — neurotic, actually — and the sort of pure, unrefined paranoia that had suddenly infested Bayard was second nature to her. Still, she would take some persuading — he was talking about uprooting their entire life, after all — and it was up to Bayard to focus that paranoia and bring it to bear on the issue at hand. She came out of the sunroom in a tentlike swimsuit, a large, solid, plain-faced woman in her late thirties, trailing children. She gave him a questioning look while the girls, chanting “Daddy, Daddy,” foamed round his legs. “We’ve got to talk,” was all he could say.

Later, after the children had been put to bed, he began his campaign. “We’re sitting on a powder keg,” he said as she bent over the dishwasher, stacking plates. She looked up, blinking behind the big rectangular frames of her glasses like a frogman coming up for air. “Pardon?”

“L.A., the whole West Coast. It’s the first place the Russians’ll hit — if the quake doesn’t drop us into the ocean first. Or the banks go under. You’ve read about the S&Ls, right?”

She looked alarmed. But then, she alarmed easily. Chronically overprotected as a child, cloistered in a parochial school run along the lines of a medieval nunnery, and then consigned to a Catholic girls’ college that made it look liberal, she believed with all her heart in the venality of man and the perfidy and rottenness of the world. On the rare occasions when she left the house she clutched her purse like a fullback going through a gap in the line, saw all pedestrians — even white-haired grandmothers — as potential muggers, and dodged Asians, Latinos, Pakistanis, and Iranians as if they were the hordes of Genghis Khan. “What in God’s name are you talking about?” she said.

“I’m talking about Montana.”

“Montana?”

At this point Bayard had simply fetched his trove of doom literature and spread it across the kitchen table. “Read,” he said, knowing full well the books and pamphlets could speak far more eloquently than he. In the morning he’d found her hunched over the table still, the ashtray full beside her, a copy of Doom Newsletter in her hand, Panic in the Streets and How to Kill, volumes I–IV, face down beside a steaming coffee mug. “But what about the girls?” she said. “What about school, ballet lessons, tennis, swimming?”

Melissa was nine, Marcia seven. The move to the hinterlands would be disruptive for them, maybe traumatic — Bayard didn’t deny it — but then, so would nuclear holocaust. “Ballet lessons?” he echoed. “What good do you think ballet lessons are going to be when maniacs are breaking down the door?” And then, more gently: “Look, Fran, it’s going to be hard for all of us, but I just don’t see how we can stay here now that our eyes have been opened — it’s like sitting on the edge of a volcano or something.”

She was weakening, he could feel it. When he got home from the office she was sunk into the sofa, her eyes darting across the page before her like frightened animals. Arkson had called. Four times. “Mrs. Wemp, Fran,” he’d shouted over the wire as if the barbarians were at the gate, “you’ve got to listen to me. I have a place for you. Nobody’ll find you. You’ll live forever. Sell that deathtrap and get out now before it’s too late!” Toward the end of the week she went through an entire day without changing out of her nightgown. Bayard pressed his advantage. He sent the girls to the babysitter and took the day off from work to ply her with pamphlets, rhetoric and incontrovertible truths, and statistics on everything from the rising crime rate to nuclear kill ratios. As dusk fell that evening, the last choked rays of sunlight irradiating the smog till it looked like mustard gas coming in over the trenches, she capitulated. In a voice weak with terror and exhaustion, she called him into the bedroom, where she lay still as a corpse. “All right,” she croaked. “Let’s get out.”

After Fran, the surgeon was easy. For fifteen minutes Bayard had quietly persisted while the doctor demurred. Finally, throwing his trump card, the surgeon leaned forward and said: “You’re aware your insurance won’t cover this, Mr. Wemp?”

Bayard had smiled. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll pay cash.”

Two months later he and Fran sported matching abdominal scars, wore new flannel shirts and down vests, talked knowledgeably of seed sets, fertilizer, and weed killer, and resided in the distant rugged reaches of the glorious Treasure State, some four hundred miles from ground zero of the nearest likely site of atomic devastation. The cabin was a good deal smaller than what they were used to, but then, they were used to luxury condominiums, and the cabin sacrificed luxury — comfort, even — for utility. Its exterior was simulated log, designed to make the place look like a trapper’s cabin to the average marauder, but the walls were reinforced with steel plates to a thickness that would withstand bazooka or antitank gun. In the basement, which featured four-foot-thick concrete walls and lead shielding, was the larder. Ranks of hermetically sealed canisters mounted the right-hand wall, each with a reassuring shelf life of ten years or more: bulk grains, wild rice, textured vegetable protein, yogurt powder, matzo meal, hardtack, lentils, bran, Metamucil. Lining the opposite wall, precisely stacked, labeled and alphabetized, were the freeze-dried entrées, from abbacchio alla cacciatora and boeuf bourguignon to shrimp Creole, turkey Tetrazzini, and ziti alla romana. Bayard took comfort in their very names, as a novice might take comfort in the names of the saints: Just In Case freeze-dried linguine with white clam sauce, tomato crystals from Lazarus Foods, canned truffles from Gourmets for Tomorrow, and Arkson’s own Stash Brand generic foodstuffs, big plain-labeled cans that read CATSUP, SAUERKRAUT, DETERGENT, LARD. In the evenings, when the house was as quiet as the far side of the moon, Bayard would slip down into the shelter, pull the airtight door closed behind him, and spend hours contemplating the breadth, variety, and nutritional range of his cache. Sinking back in a padded armchair, his heartbeat decelerating, breathing slowed to a whisper, he would feel the calm of the womb descend on him. Then he knew the pleasures of the miser, the hoarder, the burrowing squirrel, and he felt as free from care as if he were wafting to and fro in the dark amniotic sea whence he sprang.

Of course, such contentment doesn’t come cheap. The whole package — land, cabin, four-wheel-drive vehicle, arms and munitions, foodstuffs, and silver bars, DeBeers diamonds, and cowrie shells for barter — had cost nearly half a million. Arkson, whose corporate diversity put him in a league with Gulf & Western, had been able to provide everything, lock, stock, and barrel, right down to the church-key opener in the kitchen drawer and the reusable toilet paper in the bathroom. There were radiation suits, flannels, and thermal underwear from Arkson Outfitters, and weapons — including a pair of Russian-made AK-47s smuggled out of Afghanistan and an Israeli grenade launcher — from Arkson Munitions. In the driveway, from Arkson Motors, Domestic and Import, was the four-wheel-drive Norwegian-made Olfputt TC 17, which would run on anything handy, from paint thinner to rubbing alcohol, climb the north face of the Eiger in an ice storm, and pull a plow through frame-deep mud. The cabin’s bookshelves were mostly given over to the how-to, survival, and self-help tomes in which Arkson Publications specialized, but there were reprints of selected classics—Journal of the Plague Year, Hiroshima, and Down and Out in London and Paris—as well. Arkson made an itemized list, tallied the whole thing up, and presented the bill to Bayard and Fran in the San Diego office.

Fran was so wrought up at this point she barely gave it a glance. She kept looking over her shoulder at the door as if in expectation of the first frenzied pillagers, and then she would glance down at the open neck of her purse and the.22-caliber Beretta Arkson had just handed her (“My gift to you, Fran,” he’d said; “learn to use it”). Bayard himself was distracted. He tried to look judicious, tried to focus on the sheet of paper before him with the knowing look one puts on for garage mechanics presenting the bill for arcane mechanical procedures and labor at the rate of a hundred and twenty dollars an hour, but he couldn’t. What did it matter? Until he was ensconced in his cabin he was like a crab without its shell. “Seems fair,” he murmured.

Arkson had come round the desk to perch on the near edge and take his hand. “No bargain rate for survival, Bayard,” he said, “no fire sales. If the price seems steep, just think of it this way: Would you put a price on your life? Or the lives of your wife and children?” He’d paused to give Bayard a saintly look, the look of the young Redeemer stepping through the doors of the temple. “Just be thankful that you two had the financial resources — and the foresight — to protect yourself.”

Bayard had looked down at the big veiny tanned hand clutching his own and shaken it mechanically. He felt numb. The past few weeks had been hellish, what with packing up, supervising the movers, and making last-minute trips to the mall for things like thread, Band-Aids, and dental floss — not to mention agonizing over the sale of the house, anticipating Fran’s starts and rushes of panic, and turning in his resignation at the Hooper-Munson Co., where he’d put in fourteen years and worked himself up to Senior Vice President in Charge of Reversing Negative Corporate Image. Without Arkson it would have been impossible. He’d soothed Fran, driven the children to school, called the movers, cleaners, and painters, and then gone to work on Bayard’s assets with the single-mindedness of a general marshaling troops. Arkson Realty had put the condo on the market and found a buyer for the summer place in Big Bear, and Arkson, Arkson, and Arkson, Brokers, had unloaded Bayard’s holdings on the stock exchange with a barely significant loss. When combined with Fran’s inheritance and the money Bayard had put away for the girls’ education, the amount realized would meet Thrive, Inc. ‘s price and then some. It was all for the best, Arkson kept telling him, all for the best. If Bayard had second thoughts about leaving his job and dropping out of society, he could put them out of his mind: society, as he’d known it, wouldn’t last out the year. And as far as money was concerned, well, they’d be living cheaply from here on out.

“Fran,” Arkson was saying, taking her hand now too and linking the three of them as if he were a revivalist leading them forward to the purifying water, “Bayard …” He paused again, overcome with emotion. “Feel lucky.”

Now, two months later, Bayard could stand on the front porch of his cabin, survey the solitary expanse of his property with its budding aspen and cotton-wood and glossy conifers, and take Arkson’s parting benediction to heart. He did feel lucky. Oh, perhaps on reflection he could see that Arkson had shaved him on one item or another, and that the doom merchant had kindled a blaze under him and Fran that put them right in the palm of his hand, but Bayard had no regrets. He felt secure, truly secure, for the first time in his adult life, and he bent contentedly to ax or hoe, glad to have escaped the Gomorrah of the city. For her part, Fran seemed to have adjusted well too. The physical environment beyond the walls of her domain had never much interested her, and so it was principally a matter of adjusting to one set of rooms as opposed to another. Most important, though, she seemed more relaxed. In the morning, she would lead the girls through their geography or arithmetic, then read, sew, or nap in the early afternoon. Later she would walk round the yard — something she rarely did in Los Angeles — or work in the flower garden she’d planted outside the front door. At night, there was television, the signals called down to earth from the heavens by means of the satellite dish Arkson had providently included in the package.

The one problem was the girls. At first they’d been excited, the whole thing a lark, a vacation in the woods, but as the weeks wore on they became increasingly withdrawn, secretive, and, as Bayard suspected, depressed. Marcia missed Mrs. Sturdivant, her second-grade teacher; Melissa missed her best friend Nicole, Disneyland, Baskin and Robbins, and the beach, in that order. Bayard saw the pale, sad ovals of their faces framed in the gloom of the back bedroom as they hovered over twice-used coloring books, and he felt as if a stake had been driven through his heart. “Don’t worry,” Fran said, “give them time. They’ll make the adjustment.” Bayard hoped so. Because there was no way they were going back to the city.

One afternoon — it was mid-June, already hot, a light breeze discovering dust and tossing it on the hoods and windshields of the cars parked along the street — Bayard was in the lot outside Chuck’s Wagon in downtown Bounceback, loading groceries into the back of the Olfputt, when he glanced up to see two men stepping out of a white Mercedes with California plates. One of them was Arkson, in his business khakis and tie. The other — tall and red-faced, skinny as a refugee in faded green jumpsuit and work boots — Bayard had never seen before. Both men stretched themselves, and then the stranger put his hands on his hips and slowly revolved a full three hundred and sixty degrees, his steady, expressionless gaze taking in the gas station, saloon, feed store, and half-deserted streets as if he’d come to seize them for nonpayment of taxes. Bayard could barely contain himself. “Sam!” he called. “Sam Arkson!” And then he was in motion, taking the lot in six animated strides, his hand outstretched in greeting.

At first Arkson didn’t seem to recognize him. He’d taken the stranger’s arm and was pointing toward the mountains like a tour guide when Bayard called out his name. Half turning, as if at some minor disturbance, Arkson gave him a preoccupied look, then swung back to say something under his breath to his companion. By then Bayard was on him, pumping his hand. “Good to see you, Sam.”

Arkson shook numbly. “You too,” he murmured, avoiding Bayard’s eyes.

There was an awkward silence. Arkson looked constipated. The stranger — his face was so red he could have been apoplectic, terminally sunburned, drunk — glared at Bayard as if they’d just exchanged insults. Bayard’s gaze shifted uneasily from the stranger’s eyes to the soiled yellow beret that lay across his head like a cheese omelet and then back again to Arkson. “I just wanted to tell you how well we’re doing, Sam,” he stammered, “and … and to thank you — I mean it, really — for everything you’ve done for us.”

Arkson brightened immediately. If a moment earlier he’d looked like a prisoner in the dock, hangdog and tentative, now he seemed his old self. He smiled, ducked his head, and held up his palm in humble acknowledgment. Then, running his fingers over the stubble of his crown, he stepped back a pace and introduced the ectomorphic stranger. “Rayfield Cullum,” he said, “Bayard Wemp.”

“Glad to meet you,” Bayard said, extending his hand.

The stranger’s hands never left his pockets. He stared at Bayard a moment out of his deepset yellow eyes, then turned his head to spit in the dirt. Bayard’s hand dropped like a stone.

“I’d say you two have something in common,” Arkson said mysteriously. And then, leaning forward and dropping his voice: “Rayfield and I are just ironing out the details on the plot next to yours. He wants in this week — tomorrow, if not sooner.” Arkson laughed. The stranger’s eyes lifted to engage Bayard’s; his face remained expressionless.

Bayard was taken by surprise. “Plot?” he repeated.

“East and south,” Arkson said, nodding. “You’ll be neighbors. I’ve got a retired couple coming in the end of the month from Saratoga Springs — they’ll be purchasing the same package as yours directly to the north of you, by that little lake.”

“Package?” Bayard was incredulous. “What is this, Levittown, Montana, or something?”

“Heh-heh, very funny, Bayard.” Arkson had put on his serious look, life and death, the world’s a jungle, LaLanne admonishing his audience over the perils of flab. “The crunch comes, Bayard,” he said, “you could support fifty people on those thirty-five acres, what with the game in those woods and the fertility of that soil. You know it as well as I do.”

Now Cullum spoke for the first time, his voice a high, nagging rasp, like static. “Arkson,” he said, driving nails into the first syllable, “I ain’t got all day.”

It was then that Melissa, giggling like a machine and with a pair of ice-cream cones thrust up like torches over her head, came tearing around the side of the building, her sister in pursuit. Marcia was not giggling. She was crying in frustration, wailing as if her heart had been torn out, and cutting the air with a stick. “Melissa!” Bayard shouted, but it was too late. Her skinny brown legs got tangled and she pitched forward into Cullum, who was just then swiveling his head round at the commotion. There was the scrape of sneakers on gravel, the glare of the sun poised motionless overhead, and then the wet, rich, fecal smear of chocolate-fudge ice cream — four scoops — on the seat of Cullum’s jumpsuit. Cullum’s knee buckled under the impact, and he jumped back as if he’d been struck by a snake. “Goddamnit!” he roared, and Bayard could see that his hands were shaking. “Goddamnit to hell!”

Melissa lay sprawled in the dirt. Stricken face, a thin wash of red on her scraped knee. Bayard was already bending roughly for her, angry, an apology on his lips, when Cullum took a step forward and kicked her twice in the ribs. “Little shit,” he hissed, his face twisted with lunatic fury, and then Arkson had his broad arms around him, pulling him back like a handler with an attack dog.

Melissa’s mouth was working in shock, the first hurt breathless shriek caught in her throat; Marcia stood white-faced behind them; Cullum was spitting out curses and dancing in Arkson’s arms. Bayard might have lifted his daughter from the dirt and pressed her to him, he might have protested, threatened, waved his fist at this rabid dog with the red face, but he didn’t. No. Before he could think he was on Cullum, catching him in the center of that flaming face with a fist like a knob of bone. Once, twice, zeroing in on the wicked little dog eyes and the fleshy dollop of the nose, butter, margarine, wet clay, something giving with a crack, and then a glancing blow off the side of the head. He felt Cullum’s work-boots flailing for his groin as he stumbled forward under his own momentum, and then Arkson was driving him up against the Mercedes and shouting something in his face. Suddenly freed, Cullum came at him, beret askew, blood bright in his nostrils, but Arkson was there, pinning Bayard to the car and shooting out an arm to catch hold of the skinny man’s shirt. “Daddy!” Melissa shrieked, the syllables broken with shock and hurt.

“You son of a bitch!” Bayard shouted.

“All right now, knock it off, will you?” Arkson held them at arm’s length like a pair of fighting cocks. “It’s just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

Bleeding, shrunk into his jumpsuit like a withered tortoise, Cullum held Bayard’s gaze and dropped his voice to a hiss. “I’ll kill you,” he said.

Fran was aghast. “Is he dangerous?” she said, turning to peer over her spectacles at Bayard and the girls as they sat at the kitchen table. She was pouring wine vinegar from a three-gallon jug into a bowl of cucumber spears. Awkwardly. “I mean, he sounds like he escaped from a mental ward or something.”

Bayard shrugged. He could still taste the tinny aftershock the incident had left in the back of his throat. A fight. He’d been involved in a fight. Though he hadn’t struck anyone in anger since elementary school, hadn’t even come close, he’d reacted instinctively in defense of his children. He sipped his gimlet and felt a glow of satisfaction.

“This is the man we’re going to have next door to us?” Fran set the bowl on the table beside a platter of reconstituted stir-fried vegetables and defrosted tofu. The girls were subdued, staring down their straws into glasses of chocolate milk. “Well?” Fran’s eyes searched him as she sat down across the table. “Do you think I can have any peace of mind with this sort of … of violence and lawlessness on my doorstep? Is this what we left the city for?”

Bayard speared a square of tofu and fed it into his mouth. “It’s hardly on our doorstep, Fran,” he said, gesturing with his fork. “Besides, I can handle him, no problem.”

A week passed. Then two. Bayard saw no more of Arkson, or of Cullum, and the incident began to fade from his mind. Perhaps Cullum had soured on the deal and gone off somewhere else — or back to the hole he’d crawled out of. And what if he did move in? Arkson was right: there was so much land between them they might never lay eyes on one another, let alone compete for resources. At any rate, Bayard was too busy to worry about it. Mornings, it was second-grade geography and fourth-grade history, which meant relearning his state capitals and trying to keep his de Sotos, Coronados, and Cabeza de Vacas straight. Afternoons, he kept busy with various home-improvement projects — constructing a lopsided playhouse for the girls, fencing his vegetable garden against the mysterious agent that masticated everything he planted right down to the root, splitting and stacking wood, fumbling over the instructions for the prefab aluminum toolshed he’d mail-ordered from the Arkson Outfitters catalogue. Every third day he drove into Bounceback for groceries (he and Fran had decided to go easy on the self-subsistence business until such time as society collapsed and made it imperative) and on weekends the family would make the long trek down to Missoula for a restaurant meal and a movie. It was on one of these occasions that they bought the rabbits.

Bayard was coming out of the hardware store with a box of twopenny nails, a set of socket wrenches, and a hacksaw when he spotted Fran and the girls across the street, huddled over a man who seemed to be part of the sidewalk. The man, Bayard saw as he crossed the street to join them, was long-haired, bearded, and dirty. He had a burlap sack beside him, and the sack was moving. “Here, here,” said the man, grinning up at them, and then he plunged his hand into the bag and drew out a rabbit by the ears. The animal’s paws were bound with rubber bands, its fur was rat-colored. “This one here’s named Duke,” the man said, grinning. “He’s trained.”

Long-whiskered, long-eared, and long-legged, it looked more like a newborn mule than a rabbit. As the man dangled it before the girls, its paws futilely kicking and eyes big with terror, Bayard almost expected it to bray. “Good eatin’, friend,” the man said, giving Bayard a shrewd look.

“Daddy,” Melissa gasped, “can we buy him? Can we?”

The man was down on his knees, fumbling in the sack. A moment later he extracted a second rabbit, as lanky, brown, and sickly-looking as the first. “This one’s Lennie. He’s trained too.”

“Can we, Daddy?” Marcia chimed in, tugging at his pant leg.

Bayard looked at Fran. The girls held their breath. “Five bucks,” the man said.

Down the street sat the Olfputt, gleaming like a gigantic toaster oven. Two women, a man in a cowboy hat, and a boy Melissa’s age stood staring at it in awe and bewilderment. Bayard jingled the change in his pocket, hesitating. “For both,” the man said.

Initially, the rabbits had seemed a good idea. Bayard was no psychologist, but he could see that these gangling flat-footed rodents, with their multiplicity of needs, with their twitching noses and grateful mouths, might help draw the girls out of themselves. He was right. From the moment they’d hustled the rabbits into the car, cut their bonds, and pressed them to their scrawny chests while Fran fretted over ticks, tularemia, and relapsing fever, the girls were absorbed with them. They fed them grass, lettuce, and the neat little pellets of rabbit food that so much resembled the neat little pellets the animals excreted. They cuddled, dressed, and brushed them. They helped Bayard construct a pair of interlocking chicken-wire cages and selected the tree from which they would hang, their thin serious faces compressed with concern over weasels, foxes, coons, coyotes. Melissa devoted less time to tormenting her sister and bemoaning the absence of her school friends; Marcia seemed less withdrawn.

For his part, Bayard too found the new pets compelling. They thumped their feet joyously when he approached their cages with lettuce or parsley, and as they nuzzled his fingers he gazed out over his cleared acre to the trees beyond and thought how this was only the beginning. He would have goats, chickens, pigs, maybe even a cow or a horse. The way he saw it, a pet today was meat on the hoof tomorrow. Hadn’t they eaten horses during the First World War? Mules, oxen, dogs? Not to mention rabbits. Of course, these particular rabbits were an exception. Though in theory they were to be skinned, stewed, and eaten in time of distress, though they represented a hedge against hard times and a life-sustaining stock of protein, Bayard looked into their quiet, moist eyes and knew he would eat lentils first.

The following week Bayard took the family into Missoula for a double sci-fi/horror feature (which only helped confirm him in his conviction that the world was disintegrating) and dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. It was after dark when they got home and the Olfputt’s headlights swung into the yard to illuminate two tiny figures hanging like wash from the simulated beam that ran the length of the front porch. Melissa spotted them first. “What’s that?” she said. “Where?”

“There, up on the porch.”

By the time Bayard saw them it was too late. Fran had seen them too — disheveled ears and limp paws, the puny little carcasses twisting slowly round their monofilament nooses — and worse, the seven-year-old, rousing herself from sleep, had caught a nightmarish glimpse of them before he could flick off the lights. “My God,” Fran whispered. They sat there a moment, the dark suffocating, no gleam of light for miles. Then Marcia began to whimper and Melissa called out his name sharply, as if in accusation, as if he alone were responsible for all the hurts and perversions of the world.

Bayard felt he was sinking. Pork fried rice and duck sauce tore at the pit of his stomach with a hellish insistence, Fran was hyperventilating, and the girls’ lamentations rose in intensity from piteous bewildered bleats to the caterwauling of demons. Frightened, angry, uncomprehending, he sat there in utter blackness, his hands trembling on the wheel. When finally he turned on the parking lights and pushed open the door, Fran clutched his arm with the grip of a madwoman. “Don’t go out there,” she hissed.

“Don’t be silly,” Bayard said.

“No,” she sobbed, clawing at him as if she were drowning. Her eyes raged at him in the dim light, the girls were weeping and moaning, and then she was pressing something into his hand, heavy, cold, instrument of death. “Take this.”

Six or seven pickups were parked outside the T&T Cocktail Bar when Bayard rolled into downtown Bounceback. It was half past eleven, still hot, the town’s solitary street light glowing like a myopic eye. As he crossed the street to the telephone outside Chuck’s Wagon, Bayard could make out a number of shadowy figures in broad-brimmed hats milling around in front of the bar. There was a murmur of disembodied voices, the nagging whine of a country fiddle, stars overhead, the glow of cigarettes below. Drunks, he thought, hurrying past them. Their lives wouldn’t be worth a carton of crushed eggs when the ax fell.

Bayard stalked up to the phone, tore the receiver from its cradle, and savagely dialed the number he’d scribbled across a paper napkin. He was angry, keyed up, hot with outrage. He listened to the phone ring once, twice, three times, as he cursed under his breath. This was too much. His wife was sick with fear, his children were traumatized, and all he’d worked for — security, self-sufficiency, peace of mind — was threatened. He’d had to prowl round his own home like a criminal, clutching a gun he didn’t know how to use, jumping at his own shadow. Each bush was an assassin, each pocket of shadow a crouching adversary, the very trees turned against him. Finally, while Fran and the girls huddled in the locked car, he’d cut down Lennie and Duke, bundled the lifeless bodies in a towel, and hid them out back. Then Fran, her face like a sack of flour, had made him turn on all the lights till the house blazed like a stage set, insisting that he search the closets, poke the muzzle of the gun under the beds, and throw back the doors of the kitchen cabinets like an undercover cop busting drug peddlers. When he’d balked at this last precaution — the cabinets couldn’t have concealed anything bigger than a basset hound — she’d reminded him of how they’d found Charlie Manson under the kitchen sink. “All right,” he’d said after searching the basement, “there’s nobody here. It’s okay.”

“It was that maniac, wasn’t it?” Fran whispered, as if afraid she’d be overheard.

“Daddy,” Melissa cried, “where’s Lennie, and … and Duke?” The last word trailed off in a broken lamentation for the dead, and Bayard felt the anger like a hot nugget inside him.

“I don’t know,” he said, pressing Melissa to him and massaging her thin, quaking little shoulders. “I don’t know.” Through the doorway he could see Mar-cia sitting in the big armchair, sucking her thumb. Suddenly he became aware of the gun in his hand. He stared down at it for a long moment, and then, almost unconsciously, as if it were a cigarette lighter or a nail clipper, he slipped it into his pocket.

Now he stood outside Chuck’s Wagon, the night breathing down his neck, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Four rings, five, six. Suddenly the line engaged and Arkson, his voice shrunk round a kernel of suspicion, answered with a quick tentative “Yeah?”

“Sam? It’s me. Bayard.”

“Who?”

“Bayard Wemp.”

There was a pause. “Oh yeah,” Arkson said finally, “Bayard. What can I do for you? You need anything?”

“No, I just wanted to ask you—”

“Because I know you’re going to be short on hardware for harvesting, canning, and all that, and I’ve got a new line of meat smokers you might want to take a look at—”

“Sam!” Bayard’s voice had gone shrill, and he fought to control it. “I just wanted to ask you about the guy in the beret, you know, the one you had with you up here last month — Cullum?”

There was another pause. Bayard could picture his mentor in a flame-retardant bathrobe, getting ready to turn in on a bed that converted to a life raft in the event that a second flood came over the earth while he lay sleeping. “Uh-huh. Yeah. What about him?”

“Well, did he ever buy the place? I mean, is he up here now?”

“Listen, Bayard, why not let bygones be bygones, huh? Rayfield is no different than you are — except maybe he doesn’t like children, is all. He’s a one-hundred-percenter, Bayard, on for the long haul like you. I’m sure he’s forgot all about that little incident — and so should you.”

Bayard drew a long breath. “I’ve got to know, Sam.”

“It takes all kinds, Bayard.”

“I don’t need advice, Sam. Just information. Look, I can go down to the county assessor’s office in the morning and get what I want.”

Arkson sighed. “All right,” he said finally. “Yes. He moved in yesterday.”

When he turned away from the phone, Bayard felt his face go hot. Survival. It was a joke. He owned thirty-five acres of untrammeled Wild West backwoods wilderness land and his only neighbor was a psychopath who kicked children in the stomach and mutilated helpless animals. Well, he wasn’t going to allow it. Society might be heading for collapse, but there were still laws on the books. He’d call the sheriff, take him to court, have him locked up.

He was halfway to his car, just drawing even with the open door of the T&T, when he became aware of a familiar sound off to his left — he turned, recognizing the distinctive high whine of an Olfputt engine. There, sitting at the curb, was an Olfputt pickup, looking like half an MX missile with a raised bed grafted to the rear end. He stopped, puzzled. This was no Ford, no Chevy, no Dodge. The Olfputt was as rare in these parts as a palanquin — he’d never seen one himself till Arkson … Suddenly he began to understand.

The door swung open. Cullum’s face was dark — purple as a birthstain in the faint light. The engine ticked, raced, and then fell back as the car idled. The headlights seemed to clutch at the street. “Hey, hey,” Cullum said. “Mr. Rocky Marciano. Mr. Streetfight.”

Bayard became aware of movement in the shadows around him. The barflies, the cowboys, had gathered silently, watching him. Cullum stood twenty feet away, a rifle dangling at his side. Bayard knew that rifle, just as he’d known the Olfputt. Russian-made, he thought. AK-47. Smuggled out of Afghanistan. He felt Fran’s little pistol against his thigh, weighing him down like a pocketful of change. His teeth were good, his heartbeat strong. He had a five-year supply of food in his basement and a gun in his pocket. Cullum was waiting.

Bayard took a step forward. Cullum spat in the dirt and raised the rifle. Bayard could have gone for his gun, but he didn’t even know how to release the safety catch, let alone aim and fire the thing, and it came to him that even if he did know how to handle it, even if he’d fired it a thousand times at cans, bottles, rocks, and junkyard rats, he would never use it, not if all the hungry hordes of the earth were at his door.

But Cullum would. Oh yes, Cullum would. Cullum was on for the long haul.

(1983)

THE IOO FACES OF DEATH VOLUME IV

He knew he’d really screwed up. Screwed up in a major and unforgiving way. You could see the perception solidifying in his eyes — eyes that seemed to swell out of his head like hard-cooked eggs extruded through the sockets, and the camera held steady. He was on a stage, faultlessly lit, and a banner proclaimed him RENALDO THE GREAT ESCAPE ARTIST. He was running sweat. Oozing it. His pores were huge, saturated, craters trenching his face like running sores. Suspended six feet above his head, held aloft by block and tackle, was a fused meteorite of junkyard metal the size of a truck engine, its lower surface bristling with the gleaming jagged teeth of a hundred kitchen knives annealed in the forges of Guadalajara. Renaldo’s hands were cuffed to his ankles, and what looked like a tugboat anchor chain was wound round his body six or eight times and bolted to the concrete floor. His lovely assistant, a heavily made-up woman whose thighs ballooned from her lacy tutu like great coppery slabs of meat, looked as if her every tremor and waking nightmare had been distilled in the bitter secretions of that moment. This was definitely not part of the act.

“Watch this,” Jamie said. “Watch this.”

Janine tightened her grip on my hand. The room shrank in on us. The beer in my free hand had gone warm, and when I lifted it to my lips it tasted of yeast and aluminum. And what did I feel? I felt the way the lovely assistant looked, felt the cold charge of revulsion and exhilaration that had come over me when I’d seen my first porno movie at the age of fourteen, felt a hairy-knuckled hand slide up my throat and jerk at a little lever there.

When the video opened, over the credits, Renaldo was clenching a straw between his teeth — a straw, a single straw, yellow and stiff, the smallest part of a broom. He was leaning forward, working the straw in the tiny aperture that controlled the release mechanism of the handcuffs. But now, because he’d begun to appreciate that this wasn’t his day, and that the consequences of that fact were irrevocable, his lips began to tremble and he lost his grip on the straw. The lovely assistant gave the camera a wild strained look and then made as if to dash forward and restore that essential wisp of vegetation to the artist’s mouth, but it was too late. With a thick slushing sound, the sound of tires moving through wet snow, the timer released the mechanism that restrained the iron monolith, and Renaldo was no more.

Jamie said something like, “Dude really bought it,” and then, “Anybody ready for a beer?”

I sat through another ninety-nine permutations of the final moment, variously lit and passionately or indifferently performed, watched the ski-masked bank robber pop his hostage’s head like a grape with the aid of a.44 Magnum and then pop his own, saw the fire-eater immolate herself and the lumberjack make his final cut. Jamie, who’d seen the video half-a-dozen times, couldn’t stop laughing. Janine said nothing, but her grip on my hand was unyielding. For my part, I remember going numb after the third or fourth death, but I sat there all the same, though there were ninety-six to go.

But then, who was counting?

The following weekend, my Aunt Marion died. Or “passed on,” as my mother put it, a delicate euphemistic phrase that conjured up ethereal realms rather than the stark black-and-white image of damp soil and burrowing insects. My mother was in New York, I was in Los Angeles. And no, I wasn’t flying in for the funeral. She cried briefly, dryly, and then hung up.

I was twenty-five at the time, a graduate of an indifferent university, a young man who went to work and made money, sought the company of young women and was perhaps too attached to the friends of his youth, Jamie in particular. I listened to the silence a moment, then phoned Janine and asked her to dinner. She was busy. What about tomorrow, then? I said. She planned to be busy then, too.

I hadn’t laid eyes on my Aunt Marion in ten years. I remembered her as a sticklike woman in a wheelchair with an unsteady lip and a nose that overhung it like a cutbank, a nose that wasn’t qualitatively different from my mother’s and, in the fullness of generation, my own. Her death was the result of an accident — negligence, my mother insisted — and already, less than twenty-four hours after the fact, there was an attorney involved.

It seemed that Aunt Marion had been on an outing to the art museum with several other inmates of the nursing home where she’d been in residence since Nixon’s presidency, and the attendant, in placing her at the head of the ramp out back of the museum dining hall, had failed to properly set the brake on the back wheels of her chair. Aunt Marion suffered from some progressive nervous disorder that had rendered her limbs useless — she was able to control her motorized chair only through the use of a joystick which she gripped between her teeth, and even then only at the best of times. Left alone at the summit of the ramp while the attendant went off to fetch another patient, Aunt Marion felt her chair begin to slip inexorably forward. The chair picked up speed; and one of the two witnesses to the accident claimed that she’d bent her face to the controls to arrest it, while the other insisted she’d done nothing at all to save herself, but had simply glided on down the ramp and into eternity with a tight little smile frozen to her face. In any case, there was blame to be assigned, very specific and undeniable blame, and a cause-and-effect reaction to explain Aunt Marion’s removal from this sphere of being, and, in the end, it seemed to give my mother some measure of comfort.

Try as I might, though, I couldn’t picture the face of Aunt Marion’s death. My own blood was involved, my own nose. And yet it was all somehow remote, distant, and the death of Renaldo the Great stayed with me in a way Aunt Marion’s could never have begun to. I don’t know what I wound up doing that weekend, but in retrospect I picture the Coast Highway, an open convertible, Jamie, a series of bars with irradiated decks and patios, and women who were very much alive.

Janine passed into oblivion, as did Carmen, Eugenie and Katrinka, and Jamie went off to explore the wide bleeding world. He spent the next eight months dredging the dark corners of countries whose names changed in the interim, the sort of places where people died in the streets as regularly as flowers sprang through the soil and pigeons fouled the monuments to the generalissimo of the month. I worked. I turned over money. Somebody gave me a cat. It shat in a box under the sink and filled the house with a graveyard stink.

Jamie had been back two months before he called to invite me to a party in the vast necropolis of the San Fernando Valley. He’d found a job inculcating moral awareness in the minds of six- and seven-year-olds at the Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Pacoima five days a week, reserving the weekends for puerile thrills. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him until I saw him standing there on the landing outside my apartment. He looked the same — rangy, bug-eyed, a plucked chicken dressed in surfer’s clothes — but for his nose. It was inflamed, punished, a dollop of meat grafted to his face by some crazed body snatcher. “What’s with the nose?” I said, dispensing with the preliminaries.

He hesitated, working up to a slow grin under the porch light. “Got in a fight in this bar,” he said. “Some dude bit it off.”

They’d sewed the tip of his nose back in place — or almost in place; it would forever be canted ever so slightly to the left — but that wasn’t what excited him. He moved past me into the living room and fumbled around in his pocket for a minute, then handed me a series of snapshots, close-ups of his face shortly after the operation. I saw the starched white sheets, the nest of pillows, Jamie’s triumphant leer and an odd glistening black line drawn across the bridge of his nose where the bandage should have been. The photos caught it from above, beneath, head-on and in profile. Jamie was looking over my shoulder. He didn’t say a word, but his breathing was quick and shallow. “So what is it?” I said, swinging round on him. “What’s the deal?”

One word, succulent as a flavored ice: “Leeches.”

“Leeches?”

He held it a moment, center stage. “That’s right, dude, latest thing. They use them to bring back the tiny blood vessels, capillaries and whatnot, the ones they can’t tie up themselves. It’s the sucking action,” and he made a kissing noise. “Suck, suck, suck. I wore them around for three days, grossing the shit out of everybody in the hospital.” He was looking into my eyes. Then he shrugged and turned away. “They wouldn’t let. me take them home, though — that was the pisser.”

The party consisted of seven people — three women and four men, including us — sitting around a formal dining-room table eating carnitas and listening to inflammatory rap at a barely audible volume. The hosts were Hilary and Stefan, who had a house within hearing distance of the Ventura Freeway and taught with Jamie in Pacoima. Hilary’s sister, Judy, was there, the end product of psychosomatic dieting and the tanning salon, along with her friend Marsha and a man in his forties with sprayed-up hair and a goatee whose name I never did catch. We drank Carta Blanca and shots of Cuervo Gold and ate flan for dessert. The general conversation ran to Jamie’s nose, leeches, bowel movements and death. I don’t know how we got into it exactly, but after dinner we gravitated toward a pair of mallowy couches the color of a Haas avocado and began our own anthology of final moments. I came back from the bathroom by way of the kitchen with a fresh beer, and Judy, sunk into her tan like something out of a sarcophagus at Karnak, was narrating the story of the two UCLA students, lovers of nature and of each other, who went kayaking off Point Dume.

It was winter, and the water was cold. There’d been a series of storms bred in the Gulf of Alaska and the hills were bleeding mud. There was frost in the Valley, and Judy’s mother lost a bougainvillea she’d had for twenty years. That was the fatal ingredient, the cold. The big sharks — the great whites — generally stayed well north of the Southern California coast, up near the Bay Area, the Farallons and beyond, where the seals were. That was what they ate: seals.

In Judy’s version, the couple had tied their kayaks together and they were resting, sharing a sandwich, maybe getting romantic — kissing, fondling each other through their wet suits. The shark wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t supposed to mistake the hulls of their kayaks for the silhouettes of two fat rich hot-blooded basking seals either, but it did. The girl drowned after going faint from blood loss and the chill of the water. They never found her lover.

“Jesus,” the older guy said, throwing up his hands. “It’s bad enough to have to go, but to wind up as sharkshit—”

Jamie, who’d been blowing softly into the aperture of his beer bottle, looked perturbed. “But how do you know?” he demanded, settling his eyes on Judy. “I mean, were you there? Did you see it, like maybe from another boat?”

She hadn’t seen it. She wasn’t there. She’d read about it in the paper.

“Uh-uh,” Jamie scolded, wagging his finger. “No fair. You have to have seen it, actually been there.”

The older guy leaned forward, lit a cigarette and told about an accident he’d witnessed on the freeway. He was coming back from the desert on a Monday night, the end of a three-day weekend, and there was a lot of traffic, but it was moving fast. Four guys in a pickup passed him — three in the cab, the fourth outside in the bed of the truck. A motorcycle stood beside him, lashed upright in the center of the bed. They passed on the right, and they were going at a pretty good clip. Just then, feeling a little bored and left out, the guy in the back of the truck mounted the motorcycle, as a joke. He got up on the seat, leaned into the wind raking over the top of the cab and pretended he was heading into the final lap of the motocross. Unfortunately — and this was the morbid thrill of the exercise; there was always a pathetic adverb attached to the narrative, a “sadly” or “tragically” or “unfortunately” to quicken the audience’s blood — unfortunately, traffic was stalled ahead, the driver hit the brakes and the erstwhile motocross champion careened into the cab and went sailing out over the side like an acrobat. And like an acrobat, miraculously, he picked himself up unhurt. The older guy paused, flicked the ash from his cigarette. But unfortunately — and there it was again — the next car hit him in the hips at sixty and flung him under the wheels of a big rig one lane over. Eight more cars hit him before the traffic stopped, and by then there wasn’t much left but hair and grease.

Hilary told the story of the “Tiger Man,” who stood outside the tiger exhibit at the L.A. Zoo eight hours a day, seven days a week, for an entire year, and then was discovered one morning on the limb of a eucalyptus that hung thirty feet over the open enclosure, in the instant before he lost his balance. She was working the concession stand at the time, a summer job while she was in college, and she heard the people round the tiger pit screaming and the tigers roaring and snarling and thought at first they were fighting. By the time she got there the tiger man was in two pieces and his insides were spread out on the grass like blue strings of sausage. They had to shoot one of the tigers, and that was a shame, a real shame.

Jamie was next. He started in on the story of Renaldo the Great as if it were an eyewitness account. “I was like at this circus in Guadalajara,” he said, and my mind began to drift.

It was my turn next, and the only death I could relate, the only one I’d witnessed face to face and not in some voyeuristic video or the pages of Newsweek or Soldier of Fortune, a true death, the dulling of the eyes, the grip gone lax, the passing from animacy to quietus, I’d never spoken of, not to anyone. The face of it came back to me at odd moments, on waking, starting the car, sitting still in the impersonal dark of the theater before the trailers begin to roll. I didn’t want to tell it. I wasn’t going to. When Jamie was done, I was going to excuse myself, lock the bathroom door behind me, lean over the toilet and flush it and flush it again till they forgot all about me.

I was sixteen. I was on the swim team at school, bulking up, pushing myself till there was no breath left in my body, and I entertained visions of strutting around the community pool in the summer with a whistle round my neck. I took the Coast Guard-approved lifesaving course and passed with flying colors. It was May, an early searing day, and I wheeled my mother’s tubercular Ford out along the ocean to a relatively secluded beach I knew, thinking to do some wind sprints in the sand and pit my hammered shoulders and iron legs against the elemental chop and roll of the Pacific. I never got the chance. Unfortunately. I came down off the hill from the highway and there was a Mexican kid there, nine or ten years old, frantic, in full blind headlong flight, running up the path toward me. His limbs were sticks, his eyes inflamed, and the urgency rode him like a jockey. “Socorro!” he cried, the syllables catching in his throat, choking him. “Socorro!” he repeated, springing up off his toes, and he had me by the arm in a fierce wet grip, and we were running.

The sand flared with reflected light, the surf broke away to the horizon beneath the blinding ache of the sky, I felt my legs under me, and there it was, the moment, the face of it, lying there in the wash like some elaborate offering to the gulls. A man, big-bellied and dark, his skin slick with the wet, lay facedown in the sand as if he’d been dropped from the clouds. The boy choked and pleaded, too wrought up even for tears, the story I didn’t want to hear spewing out of him in a language I couldn’t comprehend, and I bent to the man and turned him over.

He wasn’t sleeping. No sleep ever looked like that. The eyes were rolled back in his head, white flecks of vomit clung to his lips and stained the dead drooping mustache, and his face was huge, bloated, and if it had been pumped up with gas, as if in a minute’s time a week had elapsed and all the rot inside him was straining to get out. There was no one else in sight. I straddled that monstrous head, cleared the dark slab of the tongue, pressed the side of my face to the sand-studded chest. I might have heard something there, faint and deep, the whisper of the sea in a smooth scalloped shell, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Mi padre,” the boy cried, “mi padre.” I was a lifesaver. I knew what to do. I knew the moment had come to pinch shut those gaping nostrils, bend my lips to the dark hole beneath the vomit-flecked mustache and breathe life into the inert form beneath me, mouth to mouth.

Mouth to mouth. I was sixteen years old. Five and a half billion of us on the planet, and here was this man, this one, this strange dark individual with the unseeing eyes and lips slick with phlegm, and I couldn’t do it. I gave the boy a look, and it was just as if I’d pulled out a handgun and shot him between the eyes, and then I got to my feet in a desperate scramble — think of a kitten plucked from the sleeping nest of its siblings, all four paws lashing blindly at the air — got to my feet, and ran.

My own father died when I was an infant, killed in a plane crash, and though I studied photos of him when I was older, I always pictured him as some faceless, mangled corpse risen from the grave like the son in “The Monkey’s Paw.” It wasn’t a healthy image, but there it was.

My mother was different. I remember her as being in constant motion, chopping things on the drainboard while the washer chugged round, taking business calls — she was an accountant — and at the same time reaching for the sponge to scrub imaginary fingerprints off the white kitchen phone, all in a simultaneous and never-ceasing whirl. She died when I was thirty-two — or “passed on,” as she would have had it. I wasn’t there. I don’t know. But as I’ve heard it told, digging round the crust of politesse and euphemism like an archaeologist unearthing a bone, there was no passing to it at all, no gentle progress, no easeful journey.

She died in public, of a heart attack. An attack. A seizure. A stroke. Violent and quick, a savage rending in the chest, no passing on, no surcease, no privacy, no dignity, no hope. She was shopping. At Safeway. Five-thirty in the afternoon, the place packed to the walls, the gleaming carts, this item and that, the little choices, seventeen point five cents an ounce as opposed to twenty-two point one. She writhed on the floor. Bit her tongue in two. Died. And all those faces, every one of them alive and condemned, gazing down on her in horror, all those dinners ruined, all that time wasted at the checkout counter.

We all knew Jamie would be the first of us to go. No one doubted it, least of all Jamie himself. He courted it, flaunted it, rented his videos and tried, in his own obsessive, relentless way, to talk it to death. Every time he got in his car, even to drive to the corner for a pack of cigarettes, it was like the start of the Indianapolis 500. He picked fights, though he was thirty years old and should have known better, dove out of airplanes, wrecked a pair of hang gliders. When he took up rock climbing, he insisted on free climbs only — no gear, no ropes, no pitons, only the thin tenuous grip of fingers and toes. I hadn’t seen him in two years. He’d long since left L.A., teaching, any sort of steady job, steady income, steady life. He was in Aspen, Dakar, Bangkok. Once in a while I got a dirt-smeared postcard from out of the amazing pipeline, exotic stamps, a mad trembling hasty scrawl of which the only legible term was “dude.”

This was the face of Jamie’s death: Studio City, a golden winter afternoon, Jamie on a bench, waiting for the bus. It had rained the week before — the whole week — and the big twisting branches of the eucalyptus trees were sodden and heavy. They have a tendency to shear off, those branches, that’s why the city keeps them trimmed back. Or used to, when there were funds for such things. A wind came up, a glorious dry-to-the-bone featherbed wind off the desert; the trees threw out their leaves and danced. And a single branch, wide around as any ordinary tree, parted company with the trunk and obliterated my friend Jamie, crushed him, made dog meat of him.

Am I too graphic? Should I soften it? Euphemize it? Pray to God in His Heaven?

When the phone rang and I heard the long-forgotten but unmistakable tones of an old high school sometime acquaintance — Victor, Victor Cashaw — I knew what he was going to say before he knew it himself. I set down the phone and gazed through the kitchen to the patio, where Linda, my wife, lay stretched out on a rattan sofa, absorbed in a magazine that revealed all the little secrets of nail acrylics and blusher and which towel to use when you wake up at his house. For all I knew, she could have been pregnant. I walked straight out the door, climbed into the car and drove down the block to Video Giant.

In a way, it was perversely gratifying to see that the 100 Faces of Death series had grown to twenty volumes, but it was Volume IV that I wanted, only that. At home, I slipped quietly into the den — Linda was still there, still on the patio sofa, still motionless but for the beat of her eyes across the page — and inserted the cassette into the slot in the machine. It had been nine years, but I recognized Renaldo as if I’d seen him yesterday, his dilemma eternal, his sweat inexhaustible, his eyes forever glossy. I watched the lovely assistant slide toward panic, focused on the sliver of straw clenched between Renaldo’s gleaming teeth. When did he realize? I wondered. Was it now? Now?

I waited till the moment came for him to drop the straw. Poor Renaldo. I froze it right there.

(1992)

LITTLE AMERICA

All he wanted was a quarter, fifty cents, a dollar maybe. The guy was a soft touch, absolutely — the softest. You could see it in the way he clutched the suitcase with his big-knuckled hairy old hands and kept blinking his eyes as if he’d just got out of bed or something. People were spilling out of the train, the usual crush — a scrawny black woman with the pale splash of a birthmark on her face and two angry-looking kids clinging to her dress, a tight little clump of pin-eared teenagers, guys with briefcases and haircuts hustling up the ramp with their chop-chop strides — and nobody had spotted the old man yet. Roger stood motionless, twenty feet from him, and waited. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rohlich holding out his battered Orioles cap to a polyester wonder with sunglasses like a visor, and he saw the look of annoyance, the firm set of the jaw, the brush-off. Rohlich’s voice came back to him like a bad radio over the squeal of the train’s brakes and the scrape and clatter of shoes on the pavement and all the birdy jabber of the arriving and departing: “Hey, who bit you in the ass, man? All I wanted was a quarter—”

But the old man, the softest of touches, never moved. He stood rooted to the floor, just in front of the Baltimore sign, his watery old eyes roving over the crowd as if he was an explorer and he’d just discovered a new tribe. The man was old, Roger could see that, seventy at least, and he didn’t have a clue as to where he was. Ducking his head and sidling across the floor with the crab walk he always used on touches — never come up to them directly, never freak them — Roger moved in. He was moistening his lips to make his pitch and thinking, A buck, a buck at least, when the old man’s face suddenly lit with a smile. Roger looked over his shoulder. There was no one there. The old man was smiling at him.

“Hey,” Roger crooned, ducking his head again and rolling it back up on his shoulders, “hello. I mean, how you doin’?”

He was wearing a suit, the old man, and nothing too shabby, either — probably mohair or something like that — and his hair was perfectly parted, a plumb line that showed a swath of naked pink scalp beneath. The skin was drawn tight under his cheekbones and there was something strange about his lips, but the milky eyes were focused now. On Roger. “Well, well,” the old man said, and his voice was deep and hearty, with an echo to it, “good to see you again, a real pleasure.” And he reached out his hand for a shake.

Roger took the hand, a dry old-man’s hand, held it a moment and looked into his eyes. “Yeah, sure. Good to see you too.” He’d begun to wonder if the guy was mental or whatever — he was probably looking for his nurse. Or his keeper. But that watch — that was a Movado, three hundred bucks, easy — and he had a college ring that looked like something. “Real good,” Roger added, for emphasis.

“Yes,” the old man said, and he smacked his lips and held the suitcase out for Roger to take. Roger could feel his heart going. This was too good to be true, a fantasy in three dimensions and Technicolor, too. He looked over his shoulder, scanned the place for cops and took the suitcase. “We’ll be at the Sheraton again, then?” the old man asked.

Roger took a deep breath, his eyes uncontainable, a whole hive of bees buzzing round inside his chest—Just get us out of here—and said, “Yeah, the Sheraton. Of course. Just like last time, right?”

The old man tugged at his nose as if he was afraid it might drop off his face. He was studying his shoes. “Just like last time,” he repeated.

One more look around, and then Roger hunched his shoulders over the suitcase and swung toward the street exit. “Follow me,” he said.

The train always brought back memories — there was a rhythm to it, a discontinuous flow that seemed to peel back the layers of his mind like growth rings in a tree. One minute he was a boy hunched over the radio with his mother as his father’s voice spoke to the whole U.S.A. from out of the clasp of the impermeable dark, and then he was a father himself, his step light on the cobbles of Beacon Hill, and then a grandfather, and finally an old man on a train, staring back at himself in the flicker of the window. The train did that to him. It was like a drug, a narcotic, a memory solution leaking drop by drop into his uncertain veins. And that was funny, too: he was on a train because he didn’t like to fly. Richard Evelyn Byrd III, son of the greatest aviator of them all, and he didn’t like to fly. Well, he was old now — he’d had enough of flying when he was a boy. A young man, really. He remembered the bright flaring skin of Antarctica, the whole ice shelf shaved close with a razor, felt the jolt of the landing and the hard sharp crack of the skis on the ice just as vividly as if they were beneath him now, saw again the light in his father’s eyes and the perfect sangfroid with which he confronted all things, the best and the worst alike.

Leverett had put him on the train in Boston and his daughter-in-law was waiting for him in Washington. He repeated it to himself, aloud, as the car swayed and clicked over the rails. Leverett. His daughter-in-law. Washington. But no, that wasn’t right. It was that pleasant young man from the Geographic Society, the one who’d been so nice about the rooms at the Sheraton, he was the one. Of course he was. A first-class reception all the way. And that was only as it should be — he, the son of the father, traveling all the way to the nation’s capital for the unveiling of the new commemorative stamp honoring the man whose legend would never die, the last of the men in the old mold, the last hero. Yes. And he would talk to them about that — to Walter what’s-his-name at the Geographic Society — about his father’s museum. He had a reindeer-skin mukluk with him now, in his suitcase, from the 1929 expedition — just to show it to them, just as bait. There was a whole houseful of stuff back in Boston, a shrine, and it was a shame it wasn’t on public display, now and permanently — and why not? For lack of a few dollars? They were financing presidents’ libraries, weren’t they? And paying out welfare and food stamps and whatnot? What would the Byrd Museum take? A million? Two? Well, he had his father’s mukluk for them and that was worth a thousand words of pleading and haggling — ten thousand.

And then the train stopped — he felt it lurch at his insides and for an instant he thought he was up in the hard pellucid Antarctic sky all over again, and he even felt the chill of it. But the train stopped, and there was his suitcase, and he got off. Washington, D.C. The capital. He recognized the station, of course he did. But where was his daughter-in-law? Where was the car? Where was that pleasant young fellow from the Geographic Society?

The old man’s voice kept nagging at him, a fruity drone that caught and swallowed itself and vomited it all back up again. Why weren’t they taking the car? Were they going to walk the whole way? And his daughter-in-law, where was she? But then he’d change the subject as if he wasn’t even listening to himself and the next minute he’d be rattling on about what a bracing day it was, just like high summer at the South Pole, ha ha ha, and now he was laughing or choking — it was hard to say which. Roger stayed two paces ahead of him, head down, fingers locked around the handle of the suitcase, and listened to him bluster and wheeze. “It’s not much farther,” he said. “You’ll see your daughter-in-law, she’ll be there, and everybody else, too. Here, this way,” he said, and he paused to let the old man draw even with him, and then he steered him down the alley out back of the recycling center.

They were six blocks from the station now, and the throttle of Roger’s heart had eased back a bit, but still, with every step he had to fight down the impulse to take the suitcase and run. That would have been the easy way. But he would have been a fool to do it and he knew the game was going to be a whole lot richer if he played it right. If he could just get the old geek into the back of the warehouse, a quiet place he knew, where the newspapers were stacked up twenty feet high, he could dig a little deeper. What else did he have besides the watch and ring? A wallet maybe? Cash? Credit cards?

At the door to the place — a big aluminum garage door that was pried up in the corner just enough to allow a no-waist man holding his breath to slip right on through — the old guy surprised him. He didn’t balk at all. Just took a glance at the trash blown up against the concrete-block wall as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, pinched in his gut and followed Roger into the dark echoing vastness of the warehouse.

And that was it: they were safe. It was over. Anything that old man had was Roger’s, right on down to his undershorts, and there was nobody to say any different. Roger led him behind a column of newsprint and set the suitcase down. “Here we are,” he said, turning to face the old man, “the Sheraton.”

“This isn’t the Sheraton,” the old man said, but he didn’t seem upset at all. He was grinning and his eyes were bright. “It isn’t the Ritz-Carlton, either. You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

Roger gave him back the grin. There was a long pause, during which he became aware of the distant beep-beep-beep of a forklift somewhere on the far side of the warehouse. “Yeah, sure,” Roger said finally, “I was only joking, sure I was. Can’t fool you, huh?” He settled himself down on a stack of newspaper and motioned for the old man to do the same. He lit a cigarette — or the stub of a cigarette he’d picked out of an ashtray at the station. He was taking his time, enjoying himself — there was no reason to rush, or to get violent, either. The old man was out there, no doubt about it.

“So what’s in the suitcase?” Roger asked casually, shaking out the match and exhaling through his nostrils.

The old guy had been sitting there, as content as if he was stretched out in his easy chair back at home, smacking his lips and chuckling softly to himself, but now his face went serious. “My father’s mukluk.”

Roger couldn’t help himself. He let out a laugh. “Your father’s who?”

“Here, let me show you,” the old man said, and Roger let him take the suitcase. He propped it up on his bony old knees, popped the latches and pulled back the lid to reveal a nest of garments — socks, shirts, handkerchiefs and a tweed sportcoat. Rummaging around a moment, he finally came up with what he was looking for — some kind of shoe or boot or something, made out of fur — and held it up for Roger’s inspection as if it was Princess Di’s tiara.

“So what did you say this was?” Roger asked, taking the thing from him and turning it over in his hand.

“My father’s mukluk. For the museum.”

Roger didn’t know what to make of this. He pulled quietly on his cigarette a moment, then handed the thing back to him with a shrug. “Is it worth anything?”

“Ha!” the old man boomed, and Roger was afraid he was going to get to his feet and try something. “Worth anything? The very mukluk Admiral Byrd wore in Little America? The very one?” The old man drew himself up, cradling the shoe to his chest. “And I tell you something — and you can tell Walter from me,” he said, lowering his voice in confidentiality. “I’ve got plenty more where this came from. Plenty. Notebooks, parkas, reindeer pants and finnesko boots, the sun compass itself — the very one he used to make his fix on the Pole.” He rocked back on his haunches. “Yes,” he murmured, and he might have been talking to himself, so oblivious was he of Roger and his surroundings, “you tell Walter. All we need is maybe a million. And that’s nothing these days. Nothing.”

The old man was as crazy as plant life, but that only took you so far, and though Roger had nowhere to go — hadn’t had anywhere to go in maybe ten years now — he was getting impatient. “You’re absolutely right,” he said, cutting him off in the middle of a windy speech about his museum, and he used the phrase as an excuse to lean forward and shake the dry old hand again. But this time, unlike the first, when every eye in the station was on them, Roger expertly slipped the watch over the bony wrist and dropped it in his coat pocket, and the old man didn’t know a thing about it.

Or maybe he did. His expression changed suddenly, as if he was trying to remember something. The lines stood out in his face. He looked old. Old and constipated. “I’m thirsty,” he suddenly announced.

“Thirsty?” Roger roared, drunk with his own success. “Hell, so am I — what say we share a pint or two, eh? Have a party. Drink to your mukluk and your museum.” He stood and patted his pockets theatrically, enjoying himself all over again — he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun. “But I’m a little short. You got any cash? For a drink, I mean?”

Another facial change. The jaw clenched, the eyes caught hold of him. “You’re not the young man from the Geographic Society,” the old man said quietly.

“The hell I’m not,” Roger protested, and he was so frisky all of a sudden he spun around twice and threw out his arms like a tap dancer rising to the finale. “Sure I am, old man, sure I am — but listen, what did you say your name was?”

“Byrd. Richard Evelyn Byrd. The third.”

Oh, the solemnity of it, the dignity. He might have been announcing the King of Arabia or something. Roger laughed out loud. “Bird, huh? Tweet-tweet. Bird the Third.” Then he let a hint of ugliness creep into his voice, and he stood over the old man now, no mistaking the posture: “I said, you got any cash for a drink, Bird the Third?”

The hand shook, the fingers fumbled in the jacket pocket, and there was the wallet, genuine calfskin, receptacle for the sort of notes and documents that separated people like the old man from Roger and Rohlich and all the other bleary-eyed, rotten-toothed bums and winos curled up on their sheets of cardboard across the city. In that moment, Roger almost felt sorry for the old retard — almost. But in the end, of course, he felt sorrier for himself, and in a quick swipe the wallet was his: five twenties, folded and joined with a paper clip; three ones; a return ticket, Washington to Boston. Photos: an old lady, a kid in a Little League outfit, some white-haired old duffer in a parka. And what was this, what was this? A Visa card, thin as a wafer, shiny as a pot of gold.

He was used to a cocktail before dinner — a Manhattan, generally, shaken, and with a twist instead of a cherry — and a good cabernet or pinot noir with his meal, but this was something he hadn’t experienced before, this was something new. The young man passed him the bottle—Gallo White Port, the label read, Alcohol 19 % By Volume—and he took a long gulping swallow that left his chin wet and his stomach burning. He was thirsty, nearly parched, and the liquid — it was cold, it was wet — went down easily, and after the first drink he didn’t care what it was. When the bottle was gone, the young man produced another, and though he’d been hungry, though he hadn’t eaten anything except the egg-salad sandwich and the apple his son had given him at the Boston station, the hunger faded and he felt better and better as the evening wore on. He was telling the young man about pemmican, how it was the highest-energy food man had yet to devise and how many calories you had to replace daily just to stay alive at seventy-five below, when all at once he felt as lucid as he ever had. He caught himself up so suddenly he almost choked. This wasn’t the young man from the Geographic Society, not at all. There was the same fringe of patchy, youthful beard, the startled blue eyes and delicate raw skin, but the nose was all wrong and the mouth had a mean, hurtful look to it. And his clothes — they were in tatters, soaked through with the grease and leavings of the ages, reeking, an unforgivably human stink he could smell from all the way over here. “This isn’t Washington,” the old man said, understanding now that he’d gotten off at the wrong stop, that he was in some other city altogether, a place he didn’t know, understanding that he was lost. “Is it?”

His face shining with drink, his ragged arms flailing at the air, the young man howled with manic glee, kicked at the newspapers heaped up round him and finally had to clutch his ribs tight to stop the laughter. He laughed till he began to cough, and he coughed till he brought something up and spat it on the floor. “You are out there, Bird,” he said, straining at each word, and the laughter seized him again. “You are really out there.”

So: he was lost. It had happened to him before, two or three times at least. A trick of the mind, that was all, one little mistake — getting off at the wrong stop, turning right instead of left — and the world became a strange and unfathomable place, terrain to explore all over again. He didn’t mind. They’d come for him, Leverett and his wife, sweet girl, really, and the grandchildren, they’d find him. But then a little wedge of concern inserted itself along the fracture line of his psyche, and it became a worry. Who was this man if he wasn’t from the Geographic Society, and what did he want? And what was this place? Newspapers. Drifts of them, mountains, a whole continent, and all it was was newsprint.

He took the bottle when it came to him and he took a drink and passed it back, and there was a third member of their party now, another hand interposed between him and the young man who wasn’t from the Geographic Society. Matted beard, nose like a bird of prey, eyes frozen into his head, and he didn’t know him, not at all, but why did he look so familiar? He felt himself drifting. It was cold, damnably cold, for what — October, wasn’t it? “Early winter this year,” he murmured, but no one uttered a word in response.

The next time he noticed anything, it was the candle. He must have dozed. But there it was, the candle. A light in the wilderness. The bottle came back to him and the feeble light leapt out suddenly to illuminate the new man’s face, and he knew him, knew him as well as he knew his own son and his own father. “You,” he said out of the void, “I know you.”

There was a low cackle, a dribble of hard-edged laughter from two ravaged throats. “Yeah, we know you, too, Bird the Third,” the young man said, and his voice had changed, the tone of it, till everything he said sounded like a schoolyard taunt.

“No,” the old man insisted, “not you … I mean”—and he looked the newcomer full in the face—“I mean you.” The inspiration had flared in his brain, and he knew the man even after all these years, a great man, his father’s equal almost, the only other man in the world who’d been to both poles and back again. “You’re Roald Amundsen.”

The laugh was ugly, almost a bark. The man showed the stubs of his teeth. He took his time, drinking, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Shit, man, sure I am,” he said, and the other one was laughing again, “and this here, your friend with the bottle, this guy’s Santy Claus.”

Roger was on a tear. For a full week, seven whole days and maybe more, he didn’t know where he was. He hadn’t had this much money, all at once, since he’d left New Jersey, when he was a kid living in that lopsided trailer with his mother and stocking the shelves at Waldbaum’s. The whole thing with the old man had been unreal, the sort of score everybody dreams about but never makes, never. Oh, sure, zombies like Rohlich would tell you they were hitchhiking once and Madonna gave them a lift or some high roller in Atlantic City handed them a C-note when all they asked for was a quarter, but this was unreal, this happened. Those five twenties alone could have kept him flying for a month or more, but of course they’d disappeared, dropped down the hole where all of it went sooner or later — usually sooner. He didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d done, but he ached all over, so it must have been good, and he needed a drink so bad he could taste it. Or couldn’t taste it. Or whatever.

And shit, it was cold. Too cold for this time of year. Cold and drizzling. When he woke up an hour or so ago he’d found himself on a wet slab of cardboard out back of the fish restaurant the yuppies flocked to — Cicero’s — and he didn’t know how he’d got there or what he’d done the night before, and his pockets were empty. No loose change. No nothing. He’d wandered over to the mission and passed a short dog around with the black guy they called Hoops, and now he was wet through to the skin and shivering and looking for a benefactor so he could invest in the Gallo Company and warm up where it counted most. He remembered the old guy’s watch then, the black Movado, and felt around in his pockets for it. It was gone. He had a further — and dimmer — recollection of pawning it and getting ten bucks for the thing and being all pissed off about it, but then he wasn’t so sure — it might have been another watch and another time.

He stayed on the street for a couple hours, it got a whole lot colder, and all he came up with was ninety-two cents. By then, his thirst was driving him crazy, so he bought a can of beer and went over to the warehouse to see who was around and maybe trade up for a hit or two of wine. He saw that somebody had tried to hammer the crease out of the door and that they’d moved a whole shitload of papers out and a whole new shitload in, but other than that nothing had changed. There was nobody around, so he made himself a little igloo out of bundled newspaper, drank his beer in two swallows, and tried to stop shivering for a minute at a time.

At first he didn’t hear it — or it didn’t register. The place was cavernous, with a ceiling you could fly planes under and walls that went on for a block, and it was noisy, middle of the day, trucks rumbling in and out of the South Street entrance with cans and bottles, and Mr. and Mrs. Nice driving up with Sis and Bud to deliver their neat foursquare string-tied bundles of newspaper. It was noisy and he didn’t hear a thing but the muted rumble of all that activity, and he wished five o’clock would come and they’d shut the place down and go home and leave him in peace, but after a while he became aware that somebody was there with him, just up the next aisle, muttering to himself in the low sweet singsong tones of the crackbrained and hopeless. Another bum. Somebody he knew maybe. A man with a short dog and maybe a bite of something scavenged from the top of the bin out back of the supermarket. He felt his spirits lift.

He pushed himself up, keeping an eye out for the watchman, and slipped up the next aisle. The papers had fallen in drifts here, sloppily stacked, and he fought his way through them in the direction of the voice, his harsh ragged breath crystallizing before him. There was a nook carved out of the wall, and he saw the back of a white head, the old withered stalk of a neck, and there he was: Bird the Third.

He was amazed. He would have thought the guy would be long gone, would have found his people, his keeper, whatever. But still, there he was, and for a moment Roger felt a surge of hope. Maybe he had something on him still, something he’d overlooked, some piece of jewelry, a pair of glasses — hell, his clothes even. But then he saw that they’d already got to him. The old retard’s suit was gone, and his socks and shoes too. Somebody’d switched on him, and he was dressed in a puke-green janitor’s jumpsuit and was missing a shoe — or he’d found a shoe somewhere, a torn greasy old Nike sneaker with the toes ripped out. He was pathetic. A mess. And he wasn’t worth anything to anybody.

For a long while, Roger just stood there watching him. The old man was shivering, his arms wrapped around himself like coils, the bare foot discolored and bad-looking. He had that thousand-mile stare on his face, the same one you saw on some of the older guys, the Vietnam vets and whatnot. Roger’s brain was working hard, and for a moment he saw himself taking the guy along to the police station and turning him in like a hero and maybe getting a reward from the guy’s family or whoever. They had to be looking for him. You don’t come from that world, with your haircut and your suitcase and your Movado watch, without somebody looking for you, especially if you’re a little soft in the head to begin with.

It was a good idea for about eight seconds, and then it became a whole lot less good, and ten seconds further on it just plain stank. There wouldn’t be any reward — maybe for Joe Average and Mr. and Mrs. Nice, maybe for them, but not for the likes of Roger. That’s how things worked. There were two worlds operating here, the one where Bird the Third and all the rest of them lived, and this one, the real one, where you slept under things at ankle level and ate the crumbs they gave you. Well, fuck that. Fuck it. It was just like the credit card. He’d tried it on maybe twenty liquor stores, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t, and nobody took him for Bird the Third, no matter how much ID he showed or how hard he tried. Not the way he looked, no way. He was going to trade the thing for a bottle at this one place—Here, you want the card, Visa Gold? Keep it—but then the jerk behind the counter got nasty, real nasty, and confiscated the whole business, plastic, ID and all. That’s how it was.

He was going to say something, goodbye or thanks for the ride or whatever, but in the end he decided against it. Somewhere, in some deep tunnel of what used to be his reality and was now somebody else’s, he even felt a stab of pity and, worse, guilt. But he comforted himself with the thought that if he hadn’t been there at the station, somebody else would have, and any way you looked at it Bird the Third would have wound up plucked. In the end, he just shrugged. Then he made his way off through the drifts, thinking maybe he’d just go on down to the station and check out the trains.

Oh, but it was cold. Cold to the bone. And dry. He knew the irony of it all too well — a shelf made of water, frozen and compacted over the howling eons, and not a drop to drink. It was locked in, unavailable, dry as paper. He shifted position and winced. It was his foot. He’d lost all feeling in it there for a while, but now it came back with a vengeance, a thousand hot needles radiating all the way up his leg to the thigh. That’s how it was with frostbite. He’d lose his toes, he knew that, but they’d all lost toes, fingers — the great ones — even the tips of their noses. There were continents to explore, unknown corners to make known, and what was a little discomfort compared to the greatness of that?

He thought of his father in the weather shack where he’d wintered alone, the fear of that eternal blackness closing in on him like a fist, alternately freezing and asphyxiating himself on the fumes from the kerosene stove. That was greatness. That was will. That was the indomitable spirit he’d inherited. But still, it was cold, terribly, implacably, unrelentingly cold, and his foot hurt him and he felt himself drifting off to sleep. That was how it happened, that was how they died out here, numbed by the cold, seduced into sleep and forgetfulness.

He stirred, and he fought it. He beat at his thighs, hammered his hands against the meat of his arms, but he couldn’t keep it up, and before long he subsided. He tried to call out, but his voice was gone, and besides, it was the coward’s way — his father would never have called out. Never. No, he would have gone on into the grip of that polar night, never wavering, never halting, on and on, into the dream.

(1992)

STONES IN MY PASSWAY, HELLHOUND ON MY TRAIL

Saturday night. He’s playing the House Party Club in Dallas, singing his blues, picking notes with a penknife. His voice rides up to a reedy falsetto that gets the men hooting and then down to a cavernous growl that chills the women, the hard chords driving behind it, his left foot beating like a hammer. The club’s patrons — field hands and laborers — pound over the floorboards like the start of the derby, stamping along with him. Skirts fly, hats slump over eyebrows, drinks spill, ironed hair goes wiry. Overhead two dim yellow bulbs sway on their cords; the light is suffused with cigarette smoke, dingy and brown. The floor is wet with spittle and tobacco juice. From the back room, a smell of eggs frying. And beans.

Huddie Doss, the proprietor, has set up a bar in the corner: two barrels of roofing nails and a pine plank. The plank supports a cluster of gallon jugs, a bottle of Mexican rum, a pewter jigger, and three lemons. Robert sits on a stool at the far end of the room, boxed in by men in kerchiefs, women in calico. The men watch his fingers, the women look into his eyes.

It is 1938, dust bowl, New Deal. FDR is on the radio, and somebody in Robin-sonville is naming a baby after Jesse Owens. Once, on the road to Natchez, Robert saw a Pierce Arrow and talked about it for a week. Another time he spent six weeks in Chicago and didn’t know the World’s Fair was going on. Now he plays his guitar up and down the Mississippi, and in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. He’s never heard of Hitler and he hasn’t eaten in two days.

When he was fifteen he watched a poisoned dog tear out its entrails. It was like this:

They were out in the fields when a voice shouted, “Loup’s gone mad!” and then he was running with the rest of them, down the slope and across the red dust road, past the shanties and into the gully where they dumped their trash, the dog crying high over the sun and then baying deep as craters in the moon. It was a coonhound, tawny, big-boned, the color of a lion. Robert pushed through the gathering crowd and stood watching as the animal dragged its hindquarters along the ground like a birthing bitch, the ropy testicles strung out behind. It was mewling now, the high-pitched cries sawing away at each breath, and then it was baying again, howling death until the day was filled with it, their ears and the pits of their stomachs soured with it. One of the men said in a terse, angry voice, “Go get Turkey Nason to come on down here with his gun.” and a boy detached himself from the crowd and darted up the rise.

It was then that the dog fell heavily to its side, ribs heaving, and began to dig at its stomach with long racing thrusts of the rear legs. There was yellow foam on the black muzzle, blood bright in the nostrils. The dog screamed and dug, dug until the flesh was raw and its teeth could puncture the cavity to get at the gray intestine, tugging first at a bulb of it and then fastening on a lank strand like dirty wash. There was no sign of the gun. The woman beside Robert began to cry, a sound like crumpling paper. Then one of the men stepped in with a shovel in his hand. He hit the dog once across the eyes and the animal lunged for him. The shovel fell twice more and the dog stiffened, its yellow eyes gazing round the circle of men, the litter of bottles and cans and rusted machinery, its head lolling on the lean, muscular neck, poised for one terrible moment, and then it was over. Afterward Robert came close: to look at the frozen teeth, the thin, rigid limbs, the green flies on the pink organs.

Between sets Robert has been out back with a girl named Beatrice, and Ida Mae Doss, Huddie’s daughter, is not happy about it. As he settles back down on the stool and reaches for his guitar, he looks up at the pine plank, the barrels, Ida Mae stationed behind the bar. She is staring at him — cold, hard, her eyes like razors. What can he do? He grins, sheepish. But then Beatrice steams in, perfumed in sweat, the blue print shift clinging like a wet sheet. She sashays through the knot of men milling around Robert and says, “Why don’t you play something sweet?” Robert pumps the neck of the guitar, strikes the strings twice, and then breaks into “Phonograph Blues”:

And we played it on the sofa and we played it ‘side the wall,

But, boys, my needle point got rusty and it will not play at all.

The men nudge one another. Ida Mae looks daggers. Beatrice flounces to the center of the floor, raises her arms above her head, and begins a slow grinding shuffle to the pulse of the guitar.

No one knows how Robert got his guitar. He left Letterman’s farm when he was sixteen, showed up a year and a half later with a new Harmony Sovereign. He walked into the Rooster Club in Robinsonville, Mississippi, and leaned against the wall while Walter Satter finished out his set. When Satter stepped up to the bar, Robert was at his elbow. “I heard your record,” Robert said. He was short, skinny, looked closer to twelve than eighteen.

“You like it?”

“Taught me a lot.”

Satter grinned.

“Mind if I sit in on the next set?”

“Sure — if you think you can go on that thing.”

Robert sat in. His voice was a shower, his guitar a storm. The sweet slide leads cut the atmosphere like lightning at dusk. Satter played rhythm behind him for a while, then stepped down.

The lemons are pulp, the rum decimated, jugs lighter. Voices drift through the open door, fireflies perforate the dark rafters. It is hot as a jungle, dark as a cave. The club’s patrons are quieter now — some slouched against the walls, others leaning on the bar, their fingers tapping like batons. Beatrice is an exception. She’s still out in the center of the floor, head swaying to the music, heels kicking, face bright with perspiration — dancing. A glass in her hand. But suddenly she lurches to the left, her leg buckles, and she goes down. There is the shrill of breaking glass, and then silence. Robert has stopped playing. The final chord rings in the air, decapitated; a sudden unnatural silence filters through the smoke haze, descending like a judgment. Robert sets the guitar across the stool and shuffles out to where Beatrice lies on the floor. She rolls heavily to her side, laughing, muttering to herself. Robert catches her under the arms, helps her up, and guides her to a chair in the corner — and then it’s over. The men start joking again, the bar gets busy, women tell stories, laugh.

Beatrice slumps in the chair, chin to chest, and begins to snore — delicate, jagged, the purr of a cat. Robert grins and pats her head — then turns to the bar. Ida Mae is there, measuring out drinks. Her eyes are moist. Robert squeezes the husk of a lemon over his glass, half fills it with rum, and presses a nickel into her palm. “What you got cooking, Ida Mae?” he says.

A thin silver chain hangs between her breasts, beneath the neckline of her cotton dress. It is ornamented with a wooden guitar pick, highly varnished, the shape of a seed.

“Got eggs,” she says. “And beans.”

Lubbock, Natchez, Pascagoula, Dallas, Eudora, Rosedale, Baton Rouge, Memphis, Friars Point, Vicksburg, Jonesboro, Mooringsport, Edwards, Chattanooga, Rolling Fork, Commerce, Itta Bena. Thelma, Betty Mae, Adeline, Harriet, Bernice, Ida Bell, Bertha Lee, Winifred, Maggie, Willie Mae. “Robert been driving too hard,” people said. “Got to stumble.”

In 1937 Franco laid siege to Madrid, the Japanese invaded Nanking, Amelia Earhart lost herself in the Pacific, and Robert made a series of recordings for Victrix Records. He was twenty-three at the time. Or twenty-two. A man from Victrix sent him train fare to New Orleans in care of the High Times Club in Biloxi. Robert slit the envelope with his penknife and ran his thumb over the green-and-silver singles while the bartender read him the letter. Robert was ecstatic. He kissed women, danced on the tables, bought a Havana cigar — but the bills whispered in his palm and he never made it to the station. A week later the man sent him a nonrefundable one-way ticket.

The man was waiting for him when the train pulled into the New Orleans station. Robert stepped off the day coach with his battered Harmony Sovereign and a cardboard valise. The stink of kerosene and coal blistered the air. Outside, automobiles stood at the curb like a dream of the twentieth century. “Walter Fa-gen,” the man said, holding out his hand. Robert looked up at the wisps of white-blond hair, the pale irises, the red tie, and then down at a torn ticket stub on the platform. “Pleased to meet you,” he mumbled. One hand was on the neck of the guitar, the other in his pocket. “Go ahead, shake,” Fagen said. Robert shook.

Fagen took him to a boardinghouse, paid the big kerchief-headed woman at the door, instructed Robert to come around to the Arlington Hotel in the morning. Then he gave him a two-dollar advance. Three hours later Fagen’s dinner was interrupted by a phone call from the New Orleans police: Robert was being held for disorderly conduct. Fagen hired a taxi, drove to the jailhouse, laid five silver dollars on the desk, and walked out with his recording artist. Robert’s right eye was swollen closed; the guitar was gone. Robert had nothing to say. When the taxi stopped in front of the boardinghouse, Fagen gave him thirty-five cents for breakfast and told him to get a good night’s sleep.

Back at the Arlington, Fagen took a seat in the dining room and reordered. He was sipping a gimlet when a boy paged him to the phone. It was Robert. “I’m lonesome,” he said.

“Lonesome?”

“Yeah — there’s a woman here wants forty cents and I’m a nickel short.”

The voices wash around her like birds at dawn, a Greek chorus gone mad. Smoke and stale sweat, the smell of lemon. She grits her teeth. “Give me a plate of it, then, girl,” he is saying. “Haven’t eat in two days.” Then she’s in the back room, stirring beans, cracking eggs, a woman scorned. The eggs, four of them, stare up at her like eyes. Tiny embryos. On the shelf above the stove: can of pepper, saltcellar, a knife, the powder they use for rats and roaches.

Agamemnon, watch out!

Robert’s dream is thick with the thighs of women, the liquid image of songs sung and songs to come, bright wire wheels and sloping fenders, swamps, trees, power lines, and the road, the road spinning out like string from a spool, like veins, blood and heart, distance without end, without horizon.

It is the last set. Things are winding down. Beatrice sags in the chair, skirt pulled up over her knees, her chest rising and falling with the soft rhythm of sleep. Beside her, a man in red suspenders presses a woman against the wall. Robert watches the woman’s hands like dark animals on the man’s hips. Earlier, a picker had been stabbed in the neck after a dispute over dice or women or liquor, and an old woman had fallen, drunk, and cut her head on the edge of a bench. But now things are winding down. Voices are hushed, cigarettes burn unattended, moonlight limns the windows.

Robert rests the guitar on his knee and does a song about a train station, a suitcase, and the eyes of a woman. His voice is mournful, sad as a steady rain, the guitar whining above it like a cry in the distance. “Yes!” they call out. “Robert!” Somebody whistles. Then they applaud, waves on the rocks, smoke rising as if from a rent in the earth. In response, the guitar reaches low for the opening bars of Robert’s signature tune, his finale, but there is something wrong — the chords staggering like a seizure, stumbling, finally breaking off cold.

Cramps. A spasm so violent it jerks his fingers from the strings. He begins again, his voice quavering, shivered: “Got to keep moving, got to keep moving, / Hellbound on my trail.” And then suddenly the voice chokes off, gags, the guitar slips to the floor with a percussive shock. His bowels are on fire. He stands, clutches his abdomen, drops to hands and knees. “Boy’s had too much of that Mexican,” someone says. He looks up, a sword run through him, panting, the shock waves pounding through his frame, looks up at the pine plank, the barrels, the cold, hard features of the girl with the silver necklace in her hand. Looks up, and snarls.

(1977)

THE HIT MAN

Early Years

The Hit Man’s early years are complicated by the black bag that he wears over his head. Teachers correct his pronunciation, the coach criticizes his attitude, the principal dresses him down for branding preschoolers with a lit cigarette. He is a poor student. At lunch he sits alone, feeding bell peppers and salami into the dark slot of his mouth. In the hallways, wiry young athletes snatch at the black hood and slap the back of his head. When he is thirteen he is approached by the captain of the football team, who pins him down and attempts to remove the hood. The Hit Man wastes him. Five years, says the judge.

Back on the Street

The Hit Man is back on the street in two months.

First Date

The girl’s name is Cynthia. The Hit Man pulls up in front of her apartment in his father’s hearse. (The Hit Man’s father, whom he loathes and abominates, is a mortician. At breakfast the Hit Man’s father had slapped the cornflakes from his son’s bowl. The son threatened to waste his father. He did not, restrained no doubt by considerations of filial loyalty and the deep-seated taboos against patricide that permeate the universal unconscious.)

Cynthia’s father has silver sideburns and plays tennis. He responds to the Hit Man’s knock, expresses surprise at the Hit Man’s appearance. The Hit Man takes Cynthia by the elbow, presses a twenty into her father’s palm, and disappears into the night.

Father’s Death

At breakfast the Hit Man slaps the cornflakes from his father’s bowl. Then wastes him.

Mother’s Death

The Hit Man is in his early twenties. He shoots pool, lifts weights and drinks milk from the carton. His mother is in the hospital, dying of cancer or heart disease. The priest wears black. So does the Hit Man.

First Job

Porfirio Buñoz, a Cuban financier, invites the Hit Man to lunch. I hear you’re looking for work, says Buñoz.

That’s right, says the Hit Man.

Peas

The Hit Man does not like peas. They are too difficult to balance on the fork.

Talk Show

The Hit Man waits in the wings, the white slash of a cigarette scarring the midnight black of his head and upper torso. The makeup girl has done his mouth and eyes, brushed the nap of his hood. He has been briefed. The guest who precedes him is a pediatrician. A planetary glow washes the stage where the host and the pediatrician, separated by a potted palm, cross their legs and discuss the little disturbances of infants and toddlers.

After the station break the Hit Man finds himself squeezed into a director’s chair, white lights in his eyes. The talk-show host is a baby-faced man in his early forties. He smiles like God and all His Angels. Well, he says. So you’re a hit man. Tell me — I’ve always wanted to know — what does it feel like to hit someone?

Death of Mateo María Buñoz

The body of Mateo María Buñoz, the cousin and business associate of a prominent financier, is discovered down by the docks on a hot summer morning. Mist rises from the water like steam, there is the smell of fish. A large black bird perches on the dead man’s forehead.

Marriage

Cynthia and the Hit Man stand at the altar, side by side. She is wearing a white satin gown and lace veil. The Hit Man has rented a tuxedo, extra-large, and a silk-lined black-velvet hood.

… Till death do you part, says the priest.

Moods

The Hit Man is moody, unpredictable. Once, in a luncheonette, the waitress brought him the meatloaf special but forgot to eliminate the peas. There was a spot of gravy on the Hit Man’s hood, about where his chin should be. He looked up at the waitress, his eyes like pins behind the triangular slots, and wasted her.

Another time he went to the track with $25, came back with $1,800. He stopped at a cigar shop. As he stepped out of the shop a wino tugged at his sleeve and solicited a quarter. The Hit Man reached into his pocket, extracted the $1,800 and handed it to the wino. Then wasted him.

First Child

A boy. The Hit Man is delighted. He leans over the edge of the playpen and molds the tiny fingers around the grip of a nickel-plated derringer. The gun is loaded with blanks — the Hit Man wants the boy to get used to the noise. By the time he is four the boy has mastered the rudiments of Tae Kwon Do, can stick a knife in the wall from a distance of ten feet and shoot a moving target with either hand. The Hit Man rests his broad palm on the boy’s head. You’re going to make the Big Leagues, Tiger, he says.

Work

He flies to Cincinnati. To L.A. To Boston. To London. The stewardesses get to know him.

Half an Acre and a Garage

The Hit Man is raking leaves, amassing great brittle piles of them. He is wearing a black T-shirt, cut off at the shoulders, and a cotton work hood, also black. Cynthia is edging the flower bed, his son playing in the grass. The Hit Man waves to his neighbors as they drive by. The neighbors wave back.

When he has scoured the lawn to his satisfaction, the Hit Man draws the smaller leaf-hummocks together in a single mound the size of a pickup truck. Then he bends to ignite it with his lighter. Immediately, flames leap back from the leaves, cut channels through the pile, engulf it in a ball of fire. The Hit Man stands back, hands folded beneath the great meaty biceps. At his side is the three-headed dog. He bends to pat each of the heads, smoke and sparks raging against the sky.

Stalking the Streets of the City

He is stalking the streets of the city, collar up, brim down. It is late at night. He stalks past department stores, small businesses, parks, and gas stations. Past apartments, picket fences, picture windows. Dogs growl in the shadows, then slink away. He could hit any of us.

Retirement

A group of businessman-types — sixtyish, seventyish, portly, diamond rings, cigars, liver spots — throws him a party. Porfirio Buñoz, now in his eighties, makes a speech and presents the Hit Man with a gilded scythe. The Hit Man thanks him, then retires to the lake, where he can be seen in his speedboat, skating out over the blue, hood rippling in the breeze.

Death

He is stricken, shrunken, half his former self. He lies propped against the pillows at Mercy Hospital, a bank of gentians drooping round the bed. Tubes run into the hood at the nostril openings, his eyes are clouded and red, sunk deep behind the triangular slots. The priest wears black. So does the Hit Man.

On the other side of town the Hit Man’s son is standing before the mirror of a shop that specializes in Hit Man attire. Trying on his first hood.

(1977)

NOT A LEG TO STAND ON

Calvin Tompkins is just lifting the soda bottle to his lips when the German-made car brakes in front of the house and the woman with the mean little eyes and the big backside climbs out in a huff. “Where’d you get that?” she demands, shoving through the hinge-sprung gate on feet so small it’s astonishing they can support her. The old man doesn’t know what to say. He can tell you the dimensions of the biggest hot dog ever made or Herbert Hoover’s hat size, but sometimes, with the rush of things, it’s all he can do to hold up his end of a conversation. Now he finds himself entirely at a loss as the big woman sways up the rotted steps to the rot-gutted porch and snatches the bottle out of his hand.

“Patio soda!” The way she says it is an indictment, her voice pinched almost to a squeal and the tiny feet stamping in outrage. “I am the only one that sells it for ten miles around here, and I want to know where you got it. Well?”

Frail as an old rooster, Calvin just gapes up at her.

She stands there a moment, her lips working in rage, the big shoulders, bosom, and belly poised over the old man in the wheelchair like an avalanche waiting to happen, then flings the bottle down in disgust. “Mein Gott, you people!” she says, and suddenly her eyes are wet.

It is then that Ormand, shadowed by Lee Junior, throws back the screen door with a crash and lurches out onto the porch. He’s got a black bottle of German beer in his hand and he’s unsteady on his feet. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he bellows, momentarily losing his footing in the heap of rags, cans, and bottles drifted up against the doorframe like detritus. Never graceful, he catches himself against the near post and sets the whole porch trembling, then takes a savage swipe at a yellow Kmart oilcan and sends it rocketing out over the railing and up against the fender of the rusted, bumper-blasted Mustang that’s been sitting alongside the house as long as the old man can remember.

“You know what is going on,” the woman says, holding her ground. “You know,” she repeats, her accent thickening with her anger, “because you are a thief!”

Ormand is big, unshaven, dirty. At twenty-two, he already has a beer gut. “Hell I am,” he says, slurring his words, and the old man realizes he’s been helping himself to the pain pills again. Behind Ormand, Lee Junior bristles. He too, Calvin now sees, is clutching a black bottle.

“Thief!” the woman shouts, and then she begins to cry, her face splotched with red, the big bosom heaving. Watching her, the old man feels a spasm of alarm: why, she’s nothing but a young girl. Thirty years old, if that. For a keen, sharp instant her grief cuts at him like a saw, but then he finds himself wondering how she got so fat. Was it all that blood sausage and beer she sells? All that potato salad?

Now Lee Junior steps forward. “You got no right to come around here and call us names, lady — this is private property.” He is standing two feet from her and he is shouting. “Why don’t you get your fat ass out of here before you get hurt, huh?”

“Yeah,” Ormand spits, backing him up. “You can’t come around here harassing this old man — he’s a veteran, for Christ’s sake. You keep it up and I’m going to have to call the police on you.”

In that instant, the woman comes back to life. The lines of her face bunch in hatred, the lips draw back from her teeth, and suddenly she’s screaming. “You call the police on me!? Don’t make me laugh.” Across the street a door slams. People are beginning to gather in their yards and driveways, straining to see what the commotion is about. “Pigs! Filth!” the woman shrieks, her little feet dancing in anger, and then she jerks back her head and spits down the front of Lee Junior’s shirt.

The rest is confusion. There’s a struggle, a stew of bodies, the sound of a blow, Lee Junior gives the woman a shove, somebody slams into Calvin’s wheelchair, Ormand’s voice cracks an octave, and the woman cries out in German; the next minute Calvin finds himself sprawled on the rough planks, gasping like a carp out of water, and the woman is sitting on her backside in the dirt at the foot of the stairs.

No one helps Calvin up. His arm hurts where he threw it out to break his fall, and his hip feels twisted or something. He lies very still. Below him, in the dirt, the woman just sits there mewling like a baby, her big lumpy yellow thighs exposed, her socks gray with dust, the little doll’s shoes worn through the soles and scuffed like the seats on the Number 56 bus.

“Get the hell out of here!” Lee Junior roars, shaking his fist. “You … you fat-assed”—here he pauses for the hatred to rise up in him, his face coiled round the words—“Nazi bitch!” And then, addressing himself to Mrs. Tuxton’s astonished face across the street, and to Norm Cramer, the gink in the Dodgers cap, and all the rest of them, he shouts: “And what are you lookin’ at, all of you? Huh?”

Nobody says a word.

Two days later Calvin is sitting out on the porch with a brand-new white plaster cast on his right forearm, watching the sparrows in the big bearded palm across the way and rehearsing numbers by way of mental exercise—5,280 feet in a mile, eight dry quarts in a peck — when Ormand comes up round the side of the house with a satchel of tools in his hand. “Hey, Calvin, what’s doin’?” he says, clapping a big moist hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Feel like takin’ a ride?”

Calvin glances down at his cast with its scrawl of good wishes—“Boogie Out!” Lee Junior had written — and then back at Ormand. He is thinking, suddenly and unaccountably, of the first time he laid eyes on the Orem place. Was it two years ago already? Yes, two years, come fall. He’d been living with that Mexicano family out in the Valley — rice and beans, rice and beans, till he thought he’d turn into a human burrito or blow out his insides or something — and then his daughter had found Jewel’s ad in the paper and gone out and made the arrangements.

“What do you say?” Ormand is leaning over him now. “Calvin?”

“A ride?” Calvin says finally. “Where to?”

Ormand shrugs. “Oh, you know: around.”

Don’t expect anything fancy she’d told him, as if he had anything to say about it. But when they got there and were actually sitting in the car out front where they had a good view of the blistered paint, dead oleanders, trash-strewn yard, and reeling porch, she was the one who got cold feet. She started in on how maybe he wouldn’t like these people and how maybe she ought to look a little further before they decided, but then bang! went the screen door and Big Lee and Ormand ambled down the steps in T-shirts and engineer boots. Big Lee folded a stick of Red Man and tucked it up alongside his teeth, Ormand was clutching a can of Safeway beer like it was grafted onto him, and both of them were grinning as if they’d just shared a dirty joke in the back of the church. And then Big Lee was reaching his callused hand in through the window to shake with Calvin. Glad to meet you, neighbor, he murmured, turning his head to spit.

Shit, Calvin had said, swiveling round to look his daughter in the eye, I like these people.

Two minutes later they’re out in the street, Ormand swinging back the door of his primer-splotched pickup, the pale bulb of Mrs. Tuxton’s face just visible beyond the curtains over her kitchen sink. Even with Ormand’s help, the old man has trouble negotiating the eight-inch traverse from the wheelchair to the car seat, what with his bum leg and fractured forearm and the general debility that comes of living so long, but once they’re under way he leans back, half closes his eyes, and gives himself up to the soothing wash of motion. Trees flit overhead, streaks of light and moving shadow, and then an open stretch and the sun, warm as a hand, on the side of his face.

Yes, he likes these people. They might have their faults — Ormand and Lee Junior are drunk three-quarters of the time (that is, whenever they’re not sleeping) and they gobble up his pain pills like M&Ms — but deep down he feels more kinship with them than he does with his own daughter. At least they’ll talk to him and treat him like a human being instead of something that’s been dead and dug up. Hell, they even seem to like him. When they go out visiting or whatever it is they do — house to house, dusty roads, day and night — they always want to take him along. So what if he has to sit there in the car sometimes for an hour or more? At least he’s out of the house.

When he looks up, they’re in a strange neighborhood. Stucco houses in shades of mustard and aquamarine, shabby palms, campers and trailers and pickups parked out front. Ormand has got a fresh beer and his eyes are shrunk back in his head. He stabs at the radio buttons and a creaky fiddle comes whining through the dashboard speaker. “You been noddin’ out there a bit, huh, Calvin?” he says.

The old man’s teeth hurt him all of a sudden, hurt him something fierce, so that the water comes to his eyes — he wants to cry out with the pain of it, but his arm begins to throb in counterpoint and pretty soon his hip starts kicking up where he twisted it and all he can do is just clamp his jaws shut in frustration. But when the car rolls to a stop beneath a dusty old oak and Ormand slips out the door with his satchel and says, “Just hang out here for a bit, okay, Calvin? I’ll be right back,” the old man finds the image of the German woman rising up in his mind like a river-run log that just won’t stay down, and his voice comes back to him. “Where did you get that soda, anyways?” he says.

“I tell you, Dad, I just don’t trust these people. Now, you look what’s happened to your arm, and then there’s this whole business of Lee going to jail—”

Calvin is sitting glumly over a bowl of tepid corn chowder in the Country Griddle, toying with his spoon and sucking his teeth like a two-year-old. Across the bright Formica table, his daughter breaks off her monologue just long enough to take a sip of coffee and a quick ladylike nip at her tuna on rye. She’s wearing an off-white dress, stockings, false eyelashes, and an expression about midway between harried and exasperated.

“He was innocent,” Calvin says.

His daughter gives him an impatient look. “Innocent or not, Dad, the man is in jail — in prison — for armed robbery. And I want to know who’s paying the bills and taking care of the place — I want to know who’s looking after you.”

“Armed robbery? The man had a screwdriver in his hand, for Christ’s sake—”

“Sharpened.”

“What?”

“I said it was a sharpened screwdriver.”

For a moment, Calvin says nothing. He fiddles with the salt shaker and watches his daughter get the Dad-you-know-you’re-not-supposed-to look on her face, and then, when he’s got her off guard, he says, “Jewel.”

“Jewel? Jewel what?”

“Takes care of the place. Pays the bills. Feeds me.” And she does a hell of a job of it too, he’s about to add, when a vast and crushing weariness suddenly descends on him. Why bother? His daughter’s up here on her day off to see about his arm and snoop around till she finds something rotten. And she’ll find it, all right, because she’s nothing but a sack of complaints and suspicions. Her ex-husband is second only to Adolf Hitler for pure maliciousness, her youngest is going to a psychiatrist three times a week, and her oldest is flunking out of college, she’s holding down two jobs to pay for the station wagon, figure-skating coaches, and orthopedic shoes, and her feet hurt. How could she even begin to understand what he feels for these people?

“Yes, and she drinks too. And that yard — it looks like something out of ‘Li’l Abner.’ “She’s waving her sandwich now, gesturing in a way that reminds him of her mother, and it makes him angry, it makes him want to throw her across his knee and paddle her. “Dad,” she’s saying, “listen. I’ve heard of this place up near me — a woman I know whose mother is bedridden recommended it and she—”

“A nursing home.”

“It’s called a ‘gerontological care facility’ and it’ll cost us seventy-five dollars more a month, but for my peace of mind — I mean, I just don’t feel right about you being with these people anymore.”

He bends low over his chowder, making a racket with the spoon. So what if Jewel drinks? (And she does, he won’t deny it — red wine mainly, out of the gallon jug — and she’s not afraid to share it, either.) Calvin drinks too. So does the president. And so does the bossy, tired-looking woman sitting across the table from him. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. Even with Lee in jail, even with her two big out-of-work nephews sitting down at the table and eating like loggers or linebackers or something, Jewel manages. And with no scrimping, either. Eggs for breakfast, bologna and American cheese on white for lunch with sweet butter pickles, and meat — real meat — for supper. Damn Mexicans never gave him meat, that’s for shit sure.

“Dad? Did you hear what I said? I think it’s time we made a change.”

“I’m going nowhere,” he says, and he means it, but already the subject has lost interest for him. Thinking of Jewel has got him thinking of her ham hocks and beans, and thinking of ham hocks and beans has got him thinking of Charlottesville, Virginia, and a time before he lost his leg when he and Bobbie Bartro were drunk on a bottle of stolen bourbon and racing up the street to his mother’s Sunday-afternoon sit-down dinner, where they slid into their seats and passed the mashed potatoes as if there were nothing more natural in the world. Off on the periphery of his consciousness he can hear his daughter trumpeting away, stringing together arguments, threatening and cajoling, but it makes no difference. His mind is made up. “Dad? Are you listening?”

Suddenly the lights are blinding him, the jukebox is scalding his ears, and the weariness pressing down on him like a truckload of cement. “Take me home, Berta,” he says.

He wakes to darkness, momentarily disoriented. The dreams have come at him like dark swooping birds, lifting him, taking him back, dropping him in scene after scene of disorder, threat, and sorrow. All of a sudden he’s sunk into the narrow hospital bed in San Bernardino, fifty years back, his head pounding with the ache of concussion, his left leg gone at the knee. What kind of motorcycle was it? the doctor asks. And then he’s in Bud’s Grocery and General Store in Charlottesville, thirteen years old, and he’s got a salami in one hand and a sixty-pound-pull hunting bow in the other and no money, and he’s out the door and running before Bud can even get out from behind the counter. And then finally, in the moment of waking, there’s Ruth, his wife, down on the kitchen floor in a spasm, hurt bad somewhere down in the deep of her. But wait: somehow all of a sudden she’s grown fat, rearranged her features and the color of her hair — somehow she’s transformed herself into the Patio-soda woman. Big, big, big. Thighs like buttermilk. You people, she says.

There’s a persistent thumping in the floorboards, like the beat of a colossal heart, and the occasional snatch of laughter. He hears Ormand’s voice, Jewel’s. Then another he doesn’t recognize. Ormand. Lee Junior. Laughter. Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he swings his legs around and drops heavily into the wheelchair. Then he fumbles for his glasses—1:30, reads the dimly glowing face of the clock — and knocks over the cup with his partial plate in it. He’s wearing his striped pajamas. No need to bother about a bathrobe.

“Hey, Calvin — what’s happening!” Ormand shouts as the old man wheels himself into the living room. Lee Junior and Jewel are sitting side by side on the couch; the Mexican kid — Calvin can never remember his name — is sprawled on the floor smoking a big yellow cigarette, and Ormand is hunched over a bottle of tequila in the easy chair. All three color TVs are on and the hi-fi is scaring up some hellacious caterwauling nonsense that sets his teeth on edge. “Come on in and join the party,” Jewel says, holding up a bottle of Spañada.

For a moment he just sits there blinking at them, his eyes adjusting to the light. The numbers are in his head again — batting averages, disaster tolls, the dimensions of the Grand Coulee Dam — and he doesn’t know what to say. “C’mon, Calvin,” Ormand says, “loosen up.”

He feels ridiculous, humbled by age. Bony as a corpse in the striped pajamas, hair fluffed out like cotton balls pasted to his head, glasses glinting in the lamplight. “Okay,” he murmurs, and Jewel is up off the couch and handing him a paper cup of the sweetened red wine.

“You hear about Rod Chefalo?” the Mexican says.

“No,” says Lee Junior.

“Ormand, you want to put on a movie or something I can watch?” Jewel says. One TV set, the biggest one, shows an auto race, little cars plastered with motor-oil stickers whizzing round a track as if in a children’s game; the other two feature brilliantined young men with guitars.

“Drove that beat Camaro of his up a tree out in the wash.”

“No shit? He wind up in the hospital or what?”

“What do you want to watch, Aunt Jewel? You just name it. I don’t give a shit about any of this.”

After a while, Calvin finds himself drifting. The wine smells like honeydew melons and oranges and tastes like Kool-Aid, but it gives him a nice little burn in the stomach. His daughter’s crazy, he’s thinking as the wine settles into him. These are good people. Nice to sit here with them in the middle of the night instead of being afraid to leave his room, like when he was with those Mexicans, or having some starched-up bitch in the nursing home dousing the lights at eight.

“You know she went to the cops?” Lee Junior’s face is like something you’d catch a glimpse of behind a fence.

“The cops?” The Mexican kid darts his black eyes round the room, as if he expects the sheriff to pop up from behind the couch. “What do you mean, she went to the cops?”

“They can’t do a thing,” Ormand cuts in. “Not without a search warrant.”

“That’s right.” Lee Junior reaches for his can of no-name beer, belching softly and thumping a fist against his sternum. “And to get one they need witnesses. And I tell you, any of these shitheels on this block come up against me, they’re going to regret it. Don’t think they don’t know it either.”

“That fat-assed Kraut,” Ormand says, but he breaks into a grin, and then he’s laughing. Lee Junior joins him and the Mexican kid makes some sort of wisecrack, but Calvin misses it. Jewel, her face noncommittal, gets up to change the channel.

“You know what I’m thinkin’?” Ormand says, grinning still. Jewel’s back is turned, and Calvin can see the flicker of green and pink under her right arm as she flips through the channels on the big TV. Lee Junior leans forward and the Mexican kid waves the smoke out of his eyes and props himself up on one elbow, a cautious little smile creeping into the lower part of his face. “What?” the Mexican kid says.

Calvin isn’t there, he doesn’t exist, the cardboard cup is as insubstantial as an eggshell in his splotched and veiny hand as he lifts it, trembling, to his lips. “I’m thinking maybe she could use another lesson.”

In the morning, early, Calvin is awakened by the crackle and stutter of a shortwave radio. His throat is dry and his head aches, three cups of wine gone sour in his mouth and leaden on his belly. With an effort, he pushes himself up and slips on his glasses. The noise seems to be coming from outside the house — static like a storm in the desert, tinny voices all chopped and diced. He parts the curtains.

A police cruiser sits at the curb, engine running, driver’s door swung open wide. Craning his neck, Calvin can get a fix on the porch and the figures of Ormand — bare chest and bare feet — and a patrolman in the uniform of the LAPD. “So what’s this all about?” Ormand is saying.

The officer glances down at the toes of his boots, and then looks up and holds Ormand’s gaze. “A break-in last night at the European Deli around the corner, 2751 Commerce Avenue. The proprietor”—and here he pauses to consult the metal-bound notepad in his hand—“a Mrs. Eva Henckle, thinks that you may have some information for us….”

Ormand’s hair is in disarray; his cheeks are dark with stubble. “No, Officer,” he says, rubbing a hand over his stomach. “I’m sorry, but we didn’t hear a thing. What time was that, did you say?”

The patrolman is young, no more than two or three years older than Ormand. In fact, he looks a bit like Ormand — if Ormand were to lose thirty pounds, stand up straight, get himself a shave, and cut the dark scraggly hair that trails down his back like something stripped from an animal. Ignoring the questions, the patrolman produces a stub of pencil and asks one of his own. “You live here with your aunt, is that right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a brother, Leland Orem, Junior — is that right?”

“That’s right,” Ormand says. “And like I said, we were all in last night and didn’t hear a thing.”

“Mother deceased?”

“Yeah.”

“And your father?”

“What’s that got to do with the price of beans?” Ormand’s expression has gone nasty suddenly, as if he’s bitten into something rotten.

For a moment, the patrolman is silent, and Calvin becomes aware of the radio again: the hiss of static, and a bored, disembodied voice responding to a second voice, equally bored and disembodied. “Do you know a Jaime Luis Torres?” the patrolman asks.

Ormand hesitates, shuffling his feet on the weathered boards a minute before answering. His voice is small. “Yes,” he says.

“Have you seen him recently?”

“No,” Ormand lies. His voice is a whisper.

“What was that?”

“I said no.”

There is another pause, the patrolman looking into Ormand’s eyes, Ormand looking back. “Mrs. Henckle’s place has been burglarized four times in the last three months. She thinks you and your brother might be responsible. What do you say?”

“I say she’s crazy.” Ormand’s face is big with indignation. The officer says nothing. “She’s had it in for us ever since we were in junior high and she says Lee took a bottle of beer out of the cooler — which he never did. She’s just a crazy bitch and we never had nothin’ to do with her.”

The patrolman seems to mull over this information a moment, thoughtfully stroking the neat clipped crescent of his mustache. Then he says, “She claims she’s seen you and your brother out here on the porch drinking types of German beer and soda you can’t get anywhere else around here — except at her place.”

“Yeah?” Ormand snarls. “And what does that prove? You want to know, I bought that stuff in downtown L.A.”

“Where?”

“This place I know, I’m not sure of the street, but I could drive you right to it, no sweat. She’s just crazy, is all. She don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“Okay, Ormand,” the officer says, snapping shut his notepad. “I’ve got it all down here. Mind if I step inside a minute and look around?”

“You got a search warrant?”

It’s a long morning. Calvin sits up in bed, trying to read an article in The Senior Citizen about looking and feeling younger—“Get Out and Dance!” the headline admonishes — but he has trouble concentrating. The house is preternaturally quiet. Ormand and Lee Junior, who rarely rise before noon, slammed out the door half an hour after the patrolman left, and they haven’t been back since. Jewel is asleep. Calvin can hear the harsh ratcheting snores from her room up the hall.

The thing that motivates him to pull on a flannel shirt and a pair of threadbare khaki pants and lower himself into the wheelchair is hunger — or at least that’s what he tells himself. Most times when Jewel overindulges her taste for red wine and sleeps through the morning, Calvin stays put until he hears her moving about in the kitchen, but today is different. It’s not just that he’s feeling out of sorts physically, the cheap wine having scoured his digestive tract as relentlessly as a dose of the cathartic his mother used to give him when he had worms as a boy, but he’s disturbed by the events of the preceding night and early morning as well. “She could use another lesson,” Ormand had said, and then, first thing in the morning, the patrolman had shown up. Down deep, deeper even than the lowest stratum of excuses and denials he can dredge up, Calvin knows it’s no coincidence.

The wheels rotate under his hands as he moves out into the hallway and eases past Jewel’s room. He can see her through the half-open door, still in her dress and sneakers, her head buried in a litter of bedclothes. Next door is the bathroom — he’s been in there three times already — and then, on the left, the kitchen. He rolls off the carpet and onto the smooth, spattered linoleum, gliding now, pulling right to skirt an overturned bag of garbage, and wheeling up to the sink for a sip of water.

The place is a mess. Unwashed cups, glasses, plates, and silverware litter the counter, and beer bottles too — the black ones. A jar of peanut butter stands open on the kitchen table, attracting flies. There’s a smear of something on the wall, the wastebasket hasn’t been emptied in a week, and the room reeks of sick-sweet decay. Calvin gulps a swallow or two of water from a cup scored with black rings. Eleven A.M. and hot already. He can feel the sweat where the glasses lie flat against his temples as he glides over to the refrigerator and swings back the door.

He’d been hoping for a leftover hamburger or a hard-boiled egg, but he isn’t ready for this: the thing is packed, top to bottom, with cold cuts, big blocks of cheese, bratwurst and Tiroler. Käse, reads the label on a wedge of white cheese, Product of Germany. Tilsiter, reads another. Schmelzkäse, Mainauer, Westfälischer Schinken. For a long moment Calvin merely sits there, the cold air in his face, the meats and blocks of cheese wrapped in white butcher’s paper, stacked up taller than his head. Somehow, he doesn’t feel hungry anymore. And then it hits him: something like anger, something like fear.

The refrigerator door closes behind him with an airtight hiss, flies scatter, an overturned cup on the floor spins wildly away from his right wheel, and he’s back in the hallway again, but this time he’s turning left into the living room. Bottles, ashtrays, crumpled newspapers, he ignores them all. On the far side of the room stands a cheap plywood door, a door he’s never been through: the door to Ormand and Lee Junior’s room. Sitting there evenings, watching TV, he’s caught a glimpse of the cluttered gloom beyond the doorway as one or the other of the boys slams in or out, but that’s about it. They’ve never invited him in, and he’s never much cared. But now, without hesitation, he wheels himself across the room, shoves down on the door latch with the heel of his hand, and pushes his way in.

He’s no fool. He knew what he would find. But still, the magnitude of it chokes up his throat and makes the blood beat in his head like a big bass drum. From one end of the room to the other, stacked up to the ceiling as if the place were a warehouse or something, are stereo sets, radios, TVs, power tools, toaster ovens, and half a dozen things Calvin doesn’t even recognize except to know that they cost an arm and a leg. In one corner are cases of beer — and, yes, Patio soda — and in the other, beneath a pair of huge PA speakers, guns. Shotguns, rifles, semiautomatics, a sack full of handguns with pearly and nickel-plated grips spilled on the floor like treasure. He can’t believe it. Or no, worse, he can. Shaken, he backs out of the room and pulls the door shut.

The house is silent as a tomb. But wait: is that Jewel? Calvin’s underarms are soaked through, a bead of sweat drops from his nose. The house stirs itself, floorboards creak of their own accord, the refrigerator starts up with a sigh. Is that Ormand? No, there: he can hear Jewel’s snores again, stutter and wheeze, faint as the hum of the flies. This is his chance: he knows what he must do.

Outside, the sun hits him like a slap in the face. Already his shoulder sockets are on fire and the cast feels like an anchor twisted round his arm. For an instant he sits there beside the door as if debating with himself, the watery old eyes scanning the street for Ormand’s pickup. Then all at once he’s in motion, rocking across the loose floorboards, past the mounds of debris, and down the ramp Ormand fixed up for him at the back end of the porch. Below, the ground is littered with tires and machine parts, with rags and branches and refuse, and almost immediately he finds himself hung up on something — part of an auto transmission, it looks like — but he leans over to wrestle with it, heart in his throat, fingers clawing at grease and metal, until he frees himself. Then he’s out the ramshackle gate and into the street.

It’s not much of a hill — a five-degree grade maybe, and fifty or sixty yards up — but to the old man it seems like Everest. So hot, his seat stuck to the chair with his own wetness, salt sweat stinging his eyes, arms pumping and elbows stabbing, on he goes. A station wagon full of kids thunders by him, and then one of those little beetle cars; up ahead, at the intersection of Tully and Commerce, he can see a man on a bicycle waiting for the light to change. Up, up, up, he chants to himself, everything clear, not a number in his head, the good and bad of his life laid out before him like an EKG chart. The next thing he knows, the hill begins to even off and he’s negotiating the sidewalk and turning the corner into the merciful shade of the store fronts. It’s almost a shock when he looks up and finds himself staring numbly at his gaunt, wild-haired image in the dark window of Eva’s European Deli.

The door stands open. For a long moment he hesitates, watching himself in the window. His face is crazy, the glint of his glasses masking his eyes, a black spot of grease on his forehead. What am I doing? he thinks. Then he wipes his hands on his pants and swings his legs through the doorway.

At first he can see nothing: the lights are out, the interior dim. There are sounds from the rear of the shop, the scrape of objects being dragged across the floor, a thump, voices. “I got no insurance, I tell you.” Plaintive, halting, the voice of the German woman. “No money. And now I owe nearly two thousand dollars for all this stock”—more heavy, percussive sounds—“all gone to waste.”

Now he begins to locate himself, objects emerging from the gloom, shades drawn, a door open to the sun all the way down the corridor in back. Christ, he thinks, looking round him. The display racks are on the floor, toppled like trees, cans and boxes and plastic packages torn open and strewn from one end of the place to the other. He can make out the beer cooler against the back wall, its glass doors shattered and wrenched from the hinges. And here, directly in front of him, like something out of a newsreel about flooding along the Mississippi, a clutter of overturned tables, smashed chairs, tangled rolls of butcher’s paper, the battered cash register and belly-up meat locker. But all this is nothing when compared with the swastikas. Black, bold, stark, they blot everything like some killing fungus. The ruined equipment, the walls, ceiling, floors, even the bleary reproductions of the Rhine and the big hand-lettered menu in the window: nothing has escaped the spray can.

“I am gone,” the German woman says. “Finished. Four times is enough.”

“Eva, Eva, Ea.” The second voice is thick and doleful, a woman’s voice, sympathy like going to the bathroom. “What can you do? You know how Mike and I would like to see those people in jail where they belong—”

“Animals,” the German woman says.

“We know it’s them — everybody on the block knows it — but we don’t have the proof and the police won’t do a thing. Honestly, I must watch that house ten hours a day but I’ve never seen a thing proof positive.” At that moment, Mrs. Tuxton’s head comes into view over the gutted meat locker. The hair lies flat against her temples, beauty-parlor silver. Her lips are pursed. “What we need is an eyewitness.”

Now the German woman swings into view, a carton in her arms. “Yah,” she says, the flesh trembling at her throat, “and you find me one in this … this stinking community. You’re a bunch of cowards — and you’ll forgive me for this, Laura — but to let criminals run scot-free on your own block, I just don’t understand it. Do you know when I was a girl in Karlsruhe after the war and we found out who was the man breaking into houses on my street, what we did? Huh?”

Calvin wants to cry out for absolution: I know, I know who did it! But he doesn’t. All of a sudden he’s afraid. The vehemence of this woman, the utter shambles of her shop, Ormand, Lee Junior, the squawk of the police radio: his head is filling up. It is then that Mrs. Tuxton swivels round and lets out a theatrical little gasp. “My God, there’s someone here!”

In the next moment they’re advancing on him, the German woman in a tentlike dress, the mean little eyes sunk into her face until he can’t see them, Mrs. Tuxton wringing her hands and jabbing her pointy nose at him as if it were a knife. “You!” the German woman exclaims, her fists working, the little feet in their worn shoes kneading the floor in agitation. “What are you doing here?”

Calvin doesn’t know what to say, his head crowded with numbers all of a sudden. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, a hundred and twenty pesos in a dollar, sixteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and one-point-oh-five quarts to a liter. “I … I—” he stammers.

“The nerve,” Mrs. Tuxton says.

“Well?” The German woman is poised over him now, just as she was on the day she slapped the soda from his hand — he can smell her, a smell like liverwurst, and it turns his stomach. “Do you know anything about this, eh? Do you?”

He does. He knows all about it. Jewel knows, Lee Junior knows, Ormand knows. They’ll go to jail, all of them. And Calvin? He’s just an old man, tired, worn out, an old man in a wheelchair. He looks into the German woman’s face and tries to feel pity, tries to feel brave, righteous, good. But instead he has a vision of himself farmed out to some nursing home, the women in the white caps prodding him and humiliating him, the stink of fatality on the air, the hacking and moaning in the night—

“I’m … I’m sorry,” he says.

Her face goes numb, flesh the color of raw dough. “Sorry?” she echoes. “Sorry?”

But he’s already backing out the door.

(1983)

GREEN HELL

There has been a collision (with birds, black flocks of them), an announcement from the pilot’s cabin, a moment of abeyed hysteria, and then the downward rush. The plane is nosing for the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, engines wheezing, spewing smoke and feathers. Lights flash, breathing apparatus drops and dangles. Our drinks become lariats, the glasses knives. Lunch (chicken croquettes, gravy, reconstituted potatoes and imitation cranberry sauce) decorates our shirts and vests. Outside there is the shriek of the air over the wings; inside, the rock-dust rumble of grinding teeth, molar on molar. My face seems to be slipping over my head like a rubber mask. And then, horribly, the first trees become visible beyond the windows. We gasp once and then we’re down, skidding through the greenery, jolted from our seats, panicked, repentant, savage. Windows strain and pop like light bulbs. We lose our bowels. The plane grates through the trees, the shriek of branches like the keen of harpies along the fuselage, our bodies jarred, dashed and knocked like the silver balls in a pinball machine. And then suddenly it’s over: we are stopped (think of a high diver meeting the board on the way down). I expect (have expected) flames.

There are no flames. There is blood. Thick clots of it, puddles, ponds, lakes. We count heads. Eight of us still have them: myself, the professor, the pilot (his arm already bound up in a sparkling white sling), the mime, Tanqueray with a twist (nothing worse than a gin drinker), the man allergic to cats (runny eyes, red nose), the cat breeder, and Andrea, the stewardess. The cats, to a one, have survived. They crouch in their cages, coated with wet kitty litter like tempura shrimp. The rugby players, all twelve of them (dark-faced, scowling sorts), are dead. Perhaps just as well.

Dazed, palms pressed to bruised organs, handkerchiefs dabbing at wounds, we hobble from the wreckage. Tanqueray is sniveling, a soft moan and gargle like rain on the roof and down the gutter. The mime makes an Emmett Kelly face. The professor limps, cradling a black briefcase with Fiskeridirektoratets Havforskningsinstitutt engraved in the corner. The cats, left aboard, begin to yowl. The allergic man throws back his head, sneezes.

We look around: trees that go up three hundred feet, lianas, leaves the size of shower curtains, weeds thick as a knit sweater. Step back ten feet and the plane disappears. The pilot breaks the news: we’ve come down in the heart of the Amazon basin, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles from the nearest toilet.

The radio, of course, is dead.

Evening

We are back in the plane. They’ve sopped up the gore, switched the seats with palm fronds, buried the rugby players. Air freshener has been sprayed. The punctures (sardine tin, church key) have been plugged with life preservers, rubber life rafts. This then, will be our shelter.

Andrea, her uniform torn over the breast and slit up the leg, portions out our dinner: two of those plastic thimbles of nondairy creamer, a petrified brioche, two plastic packets of Thousand Island dressing, a cup of water and Bloody Mary mix. Apiece.

“Life has its little rewards,” says Tanqueray, smacking his lips. He is a man of sagging flesh, torrid complexion, drooping into his sixth decade. There are two empty gin bottles (miniatures) on his tray.

The professor looks up at him. He pages rapidly through a Norwegian-English dictionary. “Good evening,” he says. “I am well. And you?”

Tanqueray nods.

“I sink we come rain,” the professor says.

The allergic man rattles a bottle of pills.

The mime makes a show of licking the plastic recesses of his Thousand Island packet.

“Foreigner, eh?” says Tanqueray.

Suddenly the pilot is on his feet. “Now listen, everybody,” he booms. “I’m going to lay it on the line. No mincing words, no pussyfooting. We’re in a jam. No food, no water, no medical supplies. I’m not saying we’re not lucky to be alive and I’m not saying that me and the prof here ain’t going to try our damnedest to get this crate in the air again … but I am saying we’re in a jam. If we stick together, if we fight this thing — if we work like a team — we’ll make it.”

I watch him: the curls at his temple, sharp nose, white teeth, the set of his jaw (prognathic). I realize that we have a leader. I further realize that I detest him. I doubt that we will make it.

“A team,” he repeats.

The mime makes his George-Washington-crossing-the-Delaware face.

Night

Chiggers, ticks, gnats, nits. Cicadas. Millipedes, centipedes, omnipedes, mini-pedes, pincerheads, poison toads, land leeches, skinks. Palmetto bugs. Iguanas, fer-de-lance, wolf spiders, diggers, buzzers, hissers, stinkers. Oonipids. Spitting spiders. Ants. Mites. Flits. Whips. Mosquitoes.

Morning

The gloom brightens beyond the shattered plastic windows. Things are cooing and chattering in the bushes. Weep-weep-weep. Coo-hooo, coo-hooo. I wake itching. There is a spider the size of a two-egg omelet on my chest. When I lift my hand (slowly and stealthily, like a tropism) he scrambles across my face and up over the seat.

Tanqueray (buttery-faced, pouchy slob) is snoring. I sit up. The cat man is watching me. “Good morning,” he whispers. The lower half of his face, from the lips down, is the color of a plum. A birthmark. I’d taken it for a beard, but now, up close, I see the mistake.

“Sleep well?” he whispers.

I grunt, scratch.

The others are still sleeping. I can hear the professor grinding his teeth, the allergic man wheezing. Andrea and the pilot are not present. The door to the pilot’s cabin is drawn shut. Somewhere, a cat wails.

“Hssst,” says the cat man. He stands, beckons with a finger, then slips out the door. I follow.

Things hiss off in the vegetation and rattle in the trees. We slash our way to the baggage compartment, where the cat man pauses to lift the door and duck his way in. Immediately I become aware of the distinctive odor attaching to the feline body functions. I step inside.

“My beauties,” says the cat man, addressing the cats. They yowl in unison and he croons to them (“little ones,” “prettyfeet,” “buttertails”) in a primitive sort of recognition rite. I realize that the cat man is an ass.

“Let me introduce you to my wards,” he says. “This”—there is a cat in his arms, its fur like cotton candy—“is Egmont. He’s a Chinchilla Persian. Best of Show at Rio two weeks ago. I wouldn’t take ten thousand dollars for him.” He looks at me. I whistle, gauging the appropriate response. He points to the cages successively: “Joy Boy, Roos, Great Northern, Peaker, and Peaker II. Roos is an Aroostook Main Coon Cat.”

“Very nice,” I say, trying to picture the man as a ten-year-old hounded into a wimpy affection for cats by the tough kids, merciless on the subject of his purple face. But then suddenly my nostrils charge. He is twisting the key on a tin of herring.

“Special diet,” he says. “For their coats.”

Real food has not passed my lips in over twenty-four hours. At his feet, a cardboard box packed with cans: baby smoked oysters, sardines, anchovies, salmon, tuna. When he turns to feed Joy Boy I fill my pockets.

He sighs. “Gorgeous, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” I say. With feeling.

Afternoon

We have had a meeting. Certain propositions have been carried. Namely, that we are a society in microcosm. That tasks will be (equably) apportioned. That we will work toward a common goal. As a team.

The pilot addressed us (slingless). He spoke with the microphone at his lips, out of habit I suppose, and with his Pan Am captain’s cap raked across one eyebrow. Andrea stood at his side, her fingers twined in his, her uniform like a fishnet. The rest of us occupied our seats (locked in the upright position), our seat belts fastened, not smoking. We itched, sweated, squirmed. The pilot talked of the spirit of democracy, the social contract, the state of nature, the myth of the noble savage and the mythopoeic significance of Uncle Sam. He also dwelt on the term pilot as image, and explored its etymology. Then, in a voice vote (yea/nay), we elected him leader.

He proceeded to assign duties. He, the pilot, would oversee food and water supplies. At the same time, he and the professor would tinker with the engine and tighten bolts. Andrea would hold their tools. The mime’s job was to write our constitution. Tanqueray would see that the miniatures were emptied. (He interjected here to indicate that he would cheerfully take on the task appointed him, though it would entail tackling the inferior spirits as well as gin — taking the bad with the good, as he put it. The pilot found him out of order and made note of the comment in any case.) To the allergic man (who sagged, red and wheezing) fell the duty of keeping things tidy within the plane. The cat man and myself were designated food gatherers, with the attendant task of clearing a landing strip. Then the pilot threw the meeting open to comments from the floor.

The allergic man stood, wiping his eyes. “I insist,” he said, and then fell into a coughing spasm, unable to continue until the mime delivered a number of slaps to his back with the even, flat strokes of a man beating a carpet. “I insist that the obscene, dander-spewing vermin in the baggage compartment be removed from the immediate vicinity of the aircraft.” (These were the first articulate sounds he had produced. Judging from diction, cadence and the accent in which they were delivered, it began to occur to me that he must be an Englishman. My father was an Englishman. I have an unreasoning, inexorable and violent loathing for all things English.) “In fact,” he continued, choking into his handkerchief, “I should like to see all the squirrelly little beggars spitted and roasted like hares, what with the state of our food supply.”

The cat man’s purple shaded to black. He unbuckled his seat belt, stood, stepped over to the English/allergic man, and put a fist in his eye. The pilot called the cat man out of order, and with the aid of Tanqueray and the professor, ejected him from the meeting. Oaths were exchanged. Outside, in the bush, a howler monkey imitated the shriek of a jaguar set afire.

The pilot adjourned the meeting.

Evening

It is almost pleasant: sun firing the highest leaves, flowers and vines and bearded Spanish moss like a Rousseau exhibit, the spit and crackle of the campfire, the sweet strong odor of roasting meat. Joy Boy and Peaker II are turning on spits. The cat man has been exiled, the spoils (fat pampered feline) confiscated. Much to my chagrin, he thought to make off with his cache of cat food, and had actually set loose Egmont, Peaker, Roos and Great Northern before the pilot could get to him. I told no one of the cat food. Eleven shiny tins of it lie buried not twenty feet from the nose of the plane. A reserve. A private reserve. Just in case.

There is a good deal of squabbling over the roast cat. The pilot, Andrea and the professor seem to wind up with the largest portions. Mine is among the smallest. Off in the black bank of the jungle we can hear the pariah gnashing his teeth, keening. He is taking it hard. The pilot says that he is a troublemaker anyway and that the community is better off without him. As I tear into Joy Boy’s plump drumstick, I cannot help agreeing.

Night

Wispy flames tremble at the wicks of three thin birthday candles Andrea has found in the galley. Their light is sufficient for the professor. He is tinkering with the radio, and with the plane’s massive battery. Suddenly the cracked speaker comes to life, sputters, coughs up a ball of static sizzling like bacon in a frying pan. The pilot is a madman. He bowls over Tanqueray, flings himself on his knees before the radio (think of altar and neophyte), snatches up the microphone and with quaking fingers switches to TRANSMIT. “Mayday, Mayday!” he shouts, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

We freeze — a sound is coming back through the speaker. The professor tunes it in, the interference like a siren coming closer and then shooting off in the distance as the sound clears. It is music, a tune. Tinny mandolins, a human voice — singing. We listen, rapt, suddenly and magically in communion with the civilized world. The song ends. Then the first strains of a commercial jingle, familiar as our mothers’ faces, things go better with Coke, but there’s something wrong, the words in a muddle. The announcer’s voice comes over — in Japanese. Radio Tokyo. Then the box goes dead. There is the smell of scorched wire, melted transistor. The pilot’s jaw lists, tears start in his eyes, his knuckles whiten over the microphone. “Good morning, Mr. Yones,” says the professor. “How are your wife?”

Morning

Many things to report:

1) The tools have vanished. The cat man suspected. Vengeance the motive. The pilot and the professor are off in the shadows, hunting him.

2) Tanqueray and the English/allergic man (nose clogged, eyes like open sores) have volunteered to make their way back to civilization and send succor. They are not actuated by blind heroism. The one has finished the miniatures, the other is out of epinephrine. Their chances — a drunken old man and a flabby asthmatic — are negligible. I will not miss them in any case. They are both consummate asses.

3)) The mime has begun our constitution. He sits hunched in his seat, face in pancake, looking uncannily like Bernardo O’Higgins.

4) I have made overtures to Andrea. When the pilot and the professor slipped off after the cat man, I took her aside and showed her a tin of sardines. She followed me out of the plane and through the dripping fronds and big squa-mate leaves. We crouched in the bush. “I had this tucked away in my suitcase,” I whispered, lying. “Thought you might want to share it with me—”

She looked at me — the green of her eyes, the leafy backdrop. Her uniform had degenerated to shorts and halter, crudely knotted. Her cleavage was deep as the jungle. “Sure,” she said.

“—for a consideration …”

“Sure.”

I turned the key. The sardines were silver, the oil gold. I counted them out, half for her, half for me. We ate. She sucked her fingers, licked the corners of the tin. I watched her tongue. When she finished she looked up at me, a fat bubble of oil on her lip. “You know,” she said, “you’re a shit. I mean you’re a real shit. Holding out, trying to bribe me. You think I’d do it with you? Listen. You nauseate me with your skinny legs and your filthy beard and your dirty little habits — I’ve been watching you since you got on the plane back at Rio. Think I don’t know your type? Ha. You’re a real shit.”

What could I say? We stood. I answered her with the vilest string of expletives I could dredge up (nineteen words in all). She caught me off balance, I tumbled back into the bushes, sat studying the shift of her buttocks as she stalked off. A spider the size of a three-egg omelet darted down the neck of my shirt. I crushed him against my chest, but his bite was like an injection of fire.

Afternoon

“Been holding out on us, eh?”

“Look, I just had the one tin — you can search through my bags if you don’t believe me. Go ahead.”

“Damn straight I will. And I got a good mind to send you down the road with that freak-faced cat fancier too. You’re sure as hell no part of this society, buddy. You never say a damn word, you don’t toe your line, and now you’re sequestering food…. You sure there’s no more of it?”

“No, I swear it. I just picked up the one tin at Rio — the label caught my eye in the snack shop at the airport.”

The pilot’s eyes are razors, his jaw a saber. He thrusts, I parry. He paws through my things, sniffs at my sport shirts, pockets a bottle of after-shave. The big fist spasmodically clenches and slackens, bunching the collar of my shirt. The professor looks on, distant, serene. The mime is busy with his writing. Andrea stands in the background, arms crossed, a tight snake’s smile on her lips.

Evening

Trees have fallen on trees here in the rain forest. Mauritia, orbyguia, Euterpe, their branches meshed with wild growths of orchids, ferns and pipers. Stands of palm. The colossal ceibas, Para nuts and sucupiras with their blue flowers high in the sun. I am feeling it, the rain forest, here in the gloom below. Sniffing it, breathing it. In the branches, tail-swinging monkeys and birds of every stripe; in the mold at my feet, two tiny armadillos, tough and black as leather. They root round my shoes, stupid piglike ratlike things. I bend toward them, a drooping statue, slow as the waning sun. My hand hangs over them. They root, oblivious. I strike.

The big one squeals (faint as a baby smothering in the night), and the smaller scuttles off, more ratlike by the second. Suddenly I am stamping, the blood pounding in my thighs, my shoes like hammers. And then I am sitting in the wet, the spiderbite swelling like a nectarine under my skin, mosquitoes black on my neck, my face, my arms, the strange crushed thing at my feet. I want to tear it, eat it raw, alone and greedy.

But I will take it back, an offering for Andrea’s cold eyes and the pilot’s terrible jaw. I will placate them, stay with the ship and the chance of rescue — I will shrink, and wait my chance, sly and watchful as a coiled bushmaster.

Night

I am excited, brimming with expectation — and yet stricken with fear, uncertainty, morbid presentiment. I have seen something in the bush — two eyes, a shadow, the hint of a human form. It was not the cat man, not the English/allergic man, not Tanqueray. I have said nothing to the others.

Tonight there are just three of us in the familiar dormitory: the professor, the mime, myself. A single stumpy candle gutters. The door has already closed on the pilot and Andrea. Outside, the leaves rattle with the calls of a thousand strange creatures, cooing, chattering, hissing, clucking, stirring wings, stretching toes, creeping beneath and scrabbling over: a festering backdrop for those pathogenic eyes in the bush.

Morning

Andrea, in bad humor, portions out breakfast — leg of armadillo, (charred scale, black claw), imitation roquefort dressing, a half-ration of water and sour mix. Apiece. She holds back the tail for herself. The mime, in tights and pancake, entertains us with animal impressions: walrus, swan, earthworm. Then he does a man shaving and showering in a flurry of interruptions: the phone, the doorbell, the oven timer. The professor laughs, a weird silent Scandinavian laugh. The pilot and Andrea scowl. My face is neutral.

Suddenly the pilot stands, cutting the performance short. “I’ve got an announcement,” he says. “We might as well face it — this crate’ll never fly, no matter how heroic the effort on the part of the prof and me.” He hangs his head (think of Christ, nailed to the cross, neck muscles gone loose, his moment of doubt and pain) — but then suddenly he snaps to attention and glares at us, his eyes like the barrels of a shotgun. “And you want to know the reason?” (He is shouting.) “A cut-and-dried case of desertion, that’s the reason. Plumface goes and disrupts the community, lets us all down — and then, as if that wasn’t enough, he makes off with our tools out of sheer spite…. I’m not going to kid you: it looks pretty grim.” (Christ again.) “Still, if we stick together—” (here he pauses, the catchword on all our lips) “—we’ll lick this jungle yet.

“Now listen. Rummy and Sneezes have been gone for nearly twenty-four hours now. Anytime we could hear those choppers coming for us. So let’s get out and clear ‘em a landing strip, back to back, like a real community!” Andrea applauds. I seethe. The mime looks like a cross between the unknown soldier and Charles de Gaulle. The professor works his mouth, searching for a phrase.

Outside, just beyond the tail of the plane, is a patch of partially cleared ground, a consequence of the crash. In the center of this patch — undiscovered as yet by any of us — are two freshly cut stakes, set in the ground. On the tips of the stakes, like twin balls of flies or swarms of bees, poise the heads of Tanqueray and the English/allergic man, dripping.

Afternoon

A quickening series of events:

— The Discovery. The professor faint, Andrea tough as a kibbutz woman.

— The Discussion. The pilot, our leader, punches our shoulders in turn. Slaps our backs. He has decided to abandon the plane in the morning. We will walk back to civilization. In charade, the mime asks if we will not all be decapitated during the coming night, our blood quaffed, bones gnawed by autochthonous cannibals. The pilot steps into his cabin, returns a moment later with a pistol the size of a football. For hijackers, he explains.

— The Preparation. We pull down the life preservers (a rain of scorpions and spiders, birds’ nests, strange black hairs). They are the color of the rain slickers worn by traffic patrolmen. We will each wear one, insurance against bottomless swamps and angry copper rivers. In addition, we are each provided with a crude walking stick cum club, at one end of which we tie up our belongings, hobo fashion. The provisions are slim: we divide up nine individual packets of sugar, six of ketchup, three rippled pepper shakers. Each of us takes a plastic spoon, knife, and fork, sealed in polyethylene with a clean white napkin.

— The Plan. We will live off the land. Eat beetle, leech, toad. We will stick together. Walk back. A team.

Evening

The mime has fallen sick. What could it be but the dreaded jungle fever? He writhes in his seat, raves (in pantomime), sweats. His makeup is a mess. The professor tends him, patting his head and crooning softly in Norwegian. Andrea and the pilot keep their distance. As do I.

We do not eat. We will need what little we have for the road. Still, around dinnertime, the pilot and Andrea mew themselves up in his cabin: they have their secrets I suppose. I have my secrets as well. As the cabin door eases shut I slip out into the penumbra of the forest floor, ferret through the stalks and creepers, dig up my hoard (the seven shiny survivors) and silently turn the key on a tin of baby smoked oysters. I pack the rest among my underwear in the tight little bundle I will carry with me in the morning.

Later, we discuss the mime’s condition. He is in no shape to travel, and yet it is clear that we cannot remain where we are. In fact, all of us are in a bug-eyed rage to get away from those rotting heads and those terrible shadows and eyes, eyes and shadows. And so, we discuss. No one mentions community, nor refers to the group constitution. The pilot puts it to a vote: stay or leave. Mime or no mime. He and Andrea vote to leave at dawn, regardless of the mime’s condition. If he can accompany us, fine. If not, he will have to stay behind (until we can direct a rescue party to the plane of course). I do not want to stay behind. I do not want to carry the mime. I raise my hand. And the professor makes it unanimous, though I doubt if he has any conception of what the vote involves. Aside, he asks me if I can direct him to the library.

Night

Andrea and the pilot choose to sleep in the main cabin for the first time.

We keep a bonfire burning through the darkness.

We share sentry duty.

The sounds of the jungle are knives punched through our chests.

Morning

I wake in a sweat. Everything still. Andrea, all leg, shoulder, navel and cleavage, is snoring, her breath grating like bark stripped from a tree. Beside her, the pilot: captain’s cap pulled over his face, gun tucked in his belt. The professor, who had the last watch, is curled in his chair asleep. Outside, the fire has burned to fine white ash and a coatimundi steals across the clearing. Something is wrong — I feel it like a bad dream that refuses to end. Then I glance over at the mime. He looks exactly like John F. Kennedy lying in state. Dead.

There is no time for ceremony. No time in fact for burial. The pilot, sour with sleep, drops a blanket over the frozen white face and leads us cautiously out of the plane, and into the bush. We shoulder our clubs, the white bundles. Our life jackets glow in the seeping gloom. The pilot, Andrea, the professor, me. A team. Pass the baton and run, I think, and chuckle to myself. My expectation of survival is low, but I follow anyway, and watch, and hope, and wait.

We walk for three hours, slimed in sweat, struggling through the leaves, creepers, tendrils, vines, shoots, stems and stalks, over the colossal rotting trunks, into the slick algae-choked ponds. Birds and monkeys screeching in the trees. Agoutis stumbling off at our feet. Snakes. The trails of ants. And in the festering water, a tapir, big as a pregnant horse. I develop a terrible thirst (the pilot, of course, is custodian of our water supply). My throat is sore, lips gummed. I think of the stories I have heard — thirst-crazed explorers plunging their heads into those scummy pools, drinking deep of every foul and crippling disease known to man. And I think of the six shiny tins in my pack.

Suddenly we are stopping (halftime, I suppose). The pilot consults his compass, the great jaw working. Andrea, 97 percent exposed flesh, is like a first-aid dummy. Slashes, paper cuts, welts, sweet droplets of blood, a leech or two, insects spotting her skin like a terminal case of moles. We throw ourselves down in the wet, breathing hard. Things of the forest floor instantly dart up our pantlegs, down our collars. Andrea asks the pilot if he has the vaguest fucking idea of where we’re headed.

He frowns down at the compass.

She asks again.

He curses.

She holds up her middle finger.

The pilot takes a step toward her, lip curled back, when suddenly his expression goes soft. There is a look of surprise, of profound perplexity on his face, as if he’d just swallowed an ice cube. In his neck, a dart. A tiny thing, with feathers (picture a fishing lure pinned beneath his chin like a miniature bow tie). And then from the bushes, a sound like a hundred bums spitting in the gutter. Two more darts appear in the pilot’s neck, a fourth and fifth in his chest. He begins to giggle as if it were a great joke, then falls to his knees, tongue caught between his teeth. We watch, horror-struck. His eyes glaze, the arms twitch at his sides, the giggles rising like a wave, cresting higher, curling, and then breaking — he drops like a piece of flotsam, face down in the mulch.

We panic. The professor screams. Andrea snatches the pilot’s pistol and begins laying waste to the vegetation. I stretch out flat, secrete my head, wishing I had a blanket to pull over it. A random bullet sprays mud and leaf in my hair. The professor screams again. Andrea has shot him. In the eye. When I look up, the revolver is in her lap and she is fumbling with the magazine. There is a dart in her cheek. It is no time to lose consciousness. But I do.

Afternoon

I wake to the sound of human voices, the smell of smoke. I lie still, a wax doll, though something tears persistently at the spider-welt on my chest. My eye winks open: there is a campfire, nine or ten naked men squatting round it, eating. Gnawing at bones. Their skin is the color of stained walnut, their bodies lean as raw muscle, their lips distended with wooden disks. Each has a red band painted across his face at eye level, from the brow to the bridge of the nose, like a party mask. There is no trace of my late teammates.

I find I am suffering from anxiety, the image of the fly-blackened heads screeching through my mind like a flight of carrion birds, the quick dark voices and the sound of tooth on bone grating in my ears. I am on the verge of bolting. But at that moment I become aware of a new figure in the group — pasty white skin, red boils and blotches, a fallen, purplish mask. The cat man. Naked and flabby. His penis wrapped in bark, pubic hair plucked. I sit up. And suddenly the whole assembly is on its feet, fingers twitching at bowstrings and blowguns. The cat man motions with his hand and the weapons drop. Barefooted, he hobbles over to me, and the others turn back to their meal. “How you feeling?” he says, squatting beside me.

I crush an insect against my chest, rake my nails over the throbbing spider-welt. I opt for sincerity. “Like a piece of shit.”

He looks hard at me, deciding something. A fat fluffy tabby scampers across the clearing, begins rubbing itself against his thigh. I recognize Egmont. He strokes it, working his finger under the ribbon round its neck. “Don’t ask any questions,” he says. And then: “Listen: I’ve decided to help you — you were the only one who loved my little beauties, the only one who never meant us any harm….”

Evening

The last. It is nothing. I follow the brown back of my guide through the shadowy maze, always steering away from the swamps and tangles, sticking to high ground. The cat man has elected to stay behind, gone feral (once an ass, always an ass). Soured on civilization, he says, by his late experience. We have had a long talk. He whimpered and sputtered. Told me of his childhood, his morbid sensitivity — marked at birth, an outcast. He’s suffered all his life, and the experience with the downed plane brought it all home. The Txukahameis (that was his name for them) were different. Noble savages. They found him wandering, took him in, marveled over the beauty of his face, appointed him demichief, exacted his vengeance for him. There was a lot to like about them, he said. Home cooking. Sexual rites. Pet ocelots. No way he was leaving. But he wished me luck.

And so I follow the brown back. Five or six hours, and then I begin to detect it — faint and distant — the chuff and stutter of a diesel. Bulldozers, two or three of them. We draw closer, the noise swells. Step by step. I can smell the exhaust. Then my guide points in the direction of the blatting engines, parts the fronds, and vanishes.

I hurry for the building road, my blood churning, a smile cracking my lips — yes, I am thinking, the moment I step from the bush I’ll be a celebrity. In a month I’ll be rich. Talk shows, interviews, newspapers, magazines — a book, a film. (Birds caw, my feet rush, the bulldozers roar.) I can picture the book jacket … my face, jungle backdrop … title in red … Survivor I’ll call it — or Alive … no, something with more flair, more gut appeal, something dramatic, something with suffering in it. Something like—Green Hell.

(1976)

ME CAGO EN LA LECHE (ROBERT JORDAN IN NICARAGUA)

“So tell me, comrade, why do you wear your hair this way?”

Robert Jordan fingered the glistening, rock-hard corona of his spiked hair (dyed mud-brown now, with khaki highlights, for the sake of camouflage) and then loosened the cap of his flask and took a long burning hit of mescal. He waited till the flame was gone from his throat and the familiar glow lit his insides so that they felt radioactive, then leaned over the campfire to address the flat-faced old man in worn fatigues. “Because I shit in the milk of my mother, that’s why,” he said, the mescal abrading his voice. He caressed the copper stud that lay tight against the flange of his left nostril and wiped his hands with exaggerated care on his Hussong’s T-shirt. “And come to think of it,” he added, “because I shit in the milk of your mother too.”

The old man, flat-faced though he was, said nothing. He wasn’t that old, actually — twenty-eight or — nine, Robert Jordan guessed — but poor nutrition, lack of dental care, and too much squinting into the sun gave him the look of a retired caterer in Miami Beach. The fire snapped, monkeys howled. “La reputa que lo parió,” the old man said finally, turning his head to spit.

Robert Jordan didn’t catch it all — he’d dropped out of college in the middle of Intermediate Spanish — but he got the gist of it all right and gave the old man the finger. “Yeah,” he said, “and screw you too.”

Two nights earlier the old man had come to him in the Managua bus station as he gingerly lifted his two aluminum-frame superlightweight High Sierra mountain packs down from the overhead rack and exited the bus that had brought him from Mexico City. The packs were stuffed with soiled underwear, granola bars, hair gel, and plastic explosives, and Robert Jordan was suffering from a hangover. He was also suffering from stomach cramps, diarrhea, and dehydration, not to mention the general debilitating effects of having spent two days and a night on a third-class bus with a potpourri of drunks, chicken thieves, disgruntled pigs, and several dozen puking, mewling, loose-bowled niñitos. “Over here, comrade,” the old man had whispered, taking him by the arm and leading him to a bench across the square.

The old man had hovered over him as Robert Jordan threw himself down on the bench and stretched his legs. Trucks rumbled by, burros brayed, campesinos hurried about their business. “You are the gringo for this of the Cup of Soup, no?” the old man asked.

Robert Jordan regarded him steadily out of the slits of his bloodshot eyes. The old man’s face was as dry and corrugated as a strip of jerky and he wore the armband of the Frente, black letters — FSLN — against a red background. Robert Jordan was thinking how good the armband would look with his Dead Kennedys tour jacket, but he’d caught the “Cup of Soup” business and nodded. That nod was all the old man needed. He broke into a grin, bent to kiss him on both cheeks, and breathed rummy fumes in his face. “I am called Bayardo,” the old man said, “and I am come to take you to the border.”

Robert Jordan felt bone-weary, but this was what he’d come for, so he stood and shouldered one of the packs while Bayardo took the other. In a few minutes they’d be boarding yet another bus, this one north to Jinotega and the Honduran border that lay beyond it. There Robert Jordan would rendezvous with one of the counter-counter-revolutionary bands (Contra Contra) and he would, if things went well, annihilate in a roar of flying earth clods and shattered trees a Contra airstrip and warehouse where foodstuffs — Twinkies, Lipton Cup of Soup, and Rice Krispies among them — were flown in from Texas by the CIA. Hence the codename, “Cup of Soup.”

But now — now they were camped somewhere on the Nicaraguan side of the border, listening to monkeys howl and getting their asses chewed off by mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, leeches, and everything else that crawled, swam, or flew. It began to rain. The rain, Robert Jordan understood, would be bad for his hair. He finished a granola bar, exchanged curses with the old man, and crawled into his one-man pup tent. “You take the first watch,” he growled through the wall of undulating nylon in his very bad Spanish. “And the second and third too. Come to think of it, why don’t you just wake me at noon.”

The camp was about what you’d expect, Robert Jordan thought, setting his pack down in a clump of poisonous-looking plants. He and the old man had hiked three days through the bug factory to get here, and what was it but a few banana-leaf hovels with cigarette cartons piled outside. Robert Jordan was thinking he’d be happy to blow this dump and get back to the drugs, whores, semi-clean linen, and tequila añejo of Mexico City and points north, when a one-eyed man emerged from the near hut, his face split with a homicidal grin. His name was Ruperto, and he wore the combat boots, baggy camouflage pants, and black T-shirt that even professors in Des Moines favored these days, and he carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his right hand. “Qué tal, old man,” he said, addressing Bayardo, and then, turning to Robert Jordan and speaking in English: “And this is the gringo with the big boom-boom. Nice hair, gringo.”

Robert Jordan traded insults with him, ending with the usual malediction about shit, milk, and mothers, and then pinched his voice through his nose in the nagging whine he’d perfected when he was four. “And so where’s all the blow that’s supposed to be dropping from the trees out here, huh? And what about maybe a hit of rum or some tortillas or something? I mean I been tramping through this craphole for three days and no sooner do I throw my pack down than I get some wiseass comment about my hair I could’ve stayed in Montana and got from some redneck cowboy. Hey,” he shouted, leaning into Ruperto’s face and twisting his voice till it broke in a snarl, “screw you too, Jack.”

Ruperto said nothing. Just smiled his homicidal smile, one eye gleaming, the other dead in a crater of pale, scarred flesh. By now the others had begun to gather — Robert Jordan counted six of them, flat-faced Indians all — and a light rain was sizzling through the trees. “You want hospitality,” Ruperto said finally, “go to Howard Johnson’s.” He spat at his feet. “Your mother,” he said, and then turned to shout over his shoulder. “Muchacha!”

Everyone stopped dead to watch as the girl in skintight fatigues stepped out of the hut, shadowed by an older woman with the build of a linebacker. “Sí?” the girl said in a voice that inflamed Robert Jordan’s groin.

Ruperto spat again. “Bring the gringo some chow.”

“The Cup of Soup?” the girl asked.

Ruperto winked his mad wet eye at Robert Jordan. “Sí,” he grunted, “the Cup of Soup.”

As he lay in his pup tent that night, his limbs entwined in the girl’s — her name was either Vidaluz or Concepción, he couldn’t remember which — Robert Jordan thought of his grandmother. She was probably the only person in the world he didn’t hate. His mother was a real zero, white wine and pasta salad all the way, and his friends back in Missoula were a bunch of dinks who thought Bryan Adams was god. His father was dead. When the old man had sucked on the barrel of his 30.06 Winchester, Robert was fourteen and angry. His role model was Sid Vicious and he was into glue and Bali Hai. It was his grandmother — she was Andalusian, really cool, a guerrilla who’d bailed out of Spain in the ‘30s, pregnant with Robert Jordan II — who listened patiently to his gripes about the school jocks and his wimpy teachers and bought him tire chains to wrap around his boots. They sat for hours together listening to the Clash’s Sandinista album, and when he blew off the tips of his pinky and ring fingers with a homemade bomb, it was she who gave him his first pair of studded black leather gloves. And what was best about her — what he liked more than anything else — was that she didn’t take any shit from anybody. Once, when her third husband, Joe Thunderbucket, called her “Little Rabbit,” she broke his arm in three places. It was she more than anyone who’d got him into all this revolution business — she and the Clash, anyway. And of course, he’d always loved dynamite.

He lay there, slapping mosquitoes, his flesh sticky against the girl’s, wondering what his grandmother was doing now, in the dark of this night before his first offensive. It was a Tuesday, wasn’t it? That was bingo night on the reservation, and she usually went with Joe’s sister Leona to punch numbers and drink boiler-makers at the bingo hall. He pictured her in her black mantilla, her eyes cold and hard and lit maybe a little with the bourbon and Coors, and then he woke up Concepción or Vidaluz and gave it to her again, all his anger focused in the sharp tingling stab and rhythm of it.

It was still dark when the old man woke him. “Son of a bitch,” Robert Jordan muttered. His hair was crushed like a Christmas-tree ornament and there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth. He didn’t mind fighting for the revolution, but this was ridiculous — it wasn’t even light yet. “Ándale,” the old man said, “the Cup of Soup awaits.”

Are you out of your gourd, or what?” Robert Jordan twisted free of the girl and checked his watch. “It’s four-fifteen, for Christ’s sake.”

The old man shrugged. “Qué puta es la guerra,” he said. “War’s a bitch.”

And then the smell of woodsmoke and frijoles came to him over Ruperto’s high crazed whinny of a laugh, the girl was up and out of his sleeping bag, strolling heavy-haunched and naked across the clearing, and Robert Jordan was reaching for his hair gel.

After breakfast — two granola bars and a tin plate of frijoles that looked and tasted like humus — Robert Jordan vomited in the weeds. He was going into battle for the first time and he didn’t have the stomach for it. This wasn’t like blowing the neighbors’ garbage cans at 2:00 A.M. or ganging up on some jerk in a frat jacket, this was the real thing. And what made it worse was that they couldn’t just slip up in the dark, attach the plastique with a timer, and let it rip when they were miles away — oh, no, that would be too simple. His instructions, carried by the old man from none other than Ruy Ruiz, the twenty-three-year-old Sandinista poet in charge of counter-counter-revolutionary activities and occasional sestinas, were to blow it by hand the moment the cargo plane landed. Over breakfast, Robert Jordan, angry though he was, had begun to understand that there was more at risk here than his coiffure. There could be shooting. Rocket fire. Grenades. A parade of images from all the schlock horror films he’d ever seen — exploding guts, melting faces, ragged ghouls risen from the grave — marched witheringly through his head and he vomited.

“Hey, gringo,” Ruperto called in English, “suck up your cojones and let’s hit it.”

Robert Jordan cursed him weakly with a barrage of shits and milks, but when he turned round to wipe the drool from his face he saw that Ruperto and his big woman had led a cluster of horses from the jungle. The big woman, her bare arms muscled like a weightlifter’s, approached him leading a gelding the size of a buffalo. “Here, gringo,” she breathed in her incongruously feminine voice, “mount up.”

“Mount?” Robert Jordan squeaked in growing panic. “I thought we were walking.”

The truth was, Robert Jordan had always hated horses. Growing up in Montana it was nothing but horses, horses, horses, morning, noon, and night. Robert Jordan was a rebel, a punk, a free spirit — he was no cowboy dildo — and for him it was dirt bikes and dune buggies. He’d been on horseback exactly twice in his life and both times he’d been thrown. Horses: they scared him. Anything with an eye that big—

“Vámonos,” Ruperto snapped. “Or are you as gutless as the rest of the gringo wimps they send us?”

“Leche,” Robert Jordan whinnied, too shaken even to curse properly. And then he was in the saddle, the big, broad-beamed monster of a horse peering back at him out of the flat wicked discs of its eyes, and they were off.

Hunkered down in the bug factory, weeds in his face, his coccyx on fire, and every muscle, ligament, and tendon in his legs and ass beaten to pulp by the hammer of the horse’s backbone, Robert Jordan waited for the cargo plane. He was cursing his grandmother, the Sandinistas, the Clash, and even Sid Vicious. This was, without doubt, the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Still, as he crouched there with the hard black plastic box of the detonator in his hand, watching the potbellied crewcut rednecks and their runty flat-faced Indian allies out on the landing strip, he felt a surge of savage joy: he was going to blow the motherfuckers to Mars and back.

Ruperto was somewhere to his left, dug in with the big woman and their Kalashnikovs. Their own flat-faced Indians, led by the flat-faced old man, were down to the right somewhere, bristling with rifles. The charges were in place — three in the high grass along the runway median and half a dozen under the prefab aluminum warehouse itself. The charges had been set by a scampering Ruperto just before dawn while the lone sentry dreamed of cold cerveza and a plate of fried dorado and banana chips. Ruperto had set them because when the time came Robert Jordan’s legs hadn’t worked and that was bad. Ruperto had called him a cheesebag, a faggot, and worse, and he’d lost face with the flat-faced Indians and the old man. But that was then, this was now.

Suddenly he heard it, the distant drone of propellers like the hum of a giant insect. He caressed the black plastic box, murmuring “Come on, baby, come on,” all the slights and sneers he’d ever suffered, all the head slaps and gibes about his hair, his gloves, and his boots, all the crap he’d taken from his yuppie bitch of a mother and those dickheads at school — all of it had come down to this. If the guys could only see him now, if they could only see the all-out, hellbent, super-destructive, radical mess he was about to make … Yes! And there it was, just over the treetops. Coming in low like a pregnant goose, stuffed full of Twinkies. He began counting down: ten, nine, eight …

The blast was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. One minute he was watching the plane touch down, its wings and fuselage unmarked but for the painted-over insignia of the Flying Tigers, the world still and serene, the sack-bellies standing back expectantly, already tasting that first long cool Bud, and then suddenly, as if he’d clapped another slide in the projector, everything disappeared in a glorious killing thunderclap of fire and smoke. Hot metal, bits of molten glass and god knew how many Twinkies, Buds, and Cups of Soup went rocketing into the air, scorching the trees, and streaming down around Robert Jordan like a furious hissing rain. When the smoke cleared there was nothing left but twisted aluminum, the burned-out hulk of the plane, and a crater the size of Rockefeller Center. From the corner of his eye Robert Jordan could see Ruperto and the big woman emerge cautiously from the bushes, weapons lowered. In a quick low crouch they scurried across the open ground and stood for a moment peering into the smoking crater, then Ruperto let out a single shout of triumph—“Yee-haw!”—and fired off a round in the air.

It was then that things got hairy. Someone opened up on them from the far side of the field — Contra Contra Contra, no doubt — and Ruperto went down. The flat-faced Indians let loose with all they had and for a minute the air screamed like a thousand babies torn open. The big woman threw Ruperto over her shoulder and flew for the jungle like a wounded crab. “Ándale!” she shouted and then the firing stopped abruptly as everyone, Robert Jordan included, bolted for the horses.

When he saw the fist-sized chunk torn out of Ruperto’s calf, Robert Jordan wanted to vomit. So he did. The horses were half crazy from the blast and the rat-tat-tat of the Kalashnikovs and they stamped and snorted like fiends from hell. God, he hated horses. But he was puking, Ruperto’s wound like raw meat flecked with dirt and bone, and the others were leaping atop their mounts, faces pulled tight with panic. Now there was firing behind them again and he straightened up and looked for his horse. There he was, Diablo, jerking wildly at his tether and kicking out his hoofs like a doped-up bronc at the rodeo. Shit. Robert Jordan wiped his lips and made a grab for the reins. It was a mistake. He might just as well have stabbed the horse with a hot poker — in that instant Diablo reared, snapped his tether, and brought all of his wet steaming nine hundred and fifty-eight pounds squarely down on Robert Jordan’s left foot.

The sound of his toes snapping was unmusical and harsh and the pain that accompanied it so completely demanding of his attention that he barely noticed the retreating flanks of Diablo as he lashed off through the undergrowth. Robert Jordan let out a howl and broke into a string of inspired curses in two languages and then sat heavily, cradling his foot. The time he’d passed out having his nose pierced flashed through his mind and then the tears started up in his eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thought. And then he remembered where he was and who was shooting at him from across the field and he looked up to see his comrades already mounted — Ruperto included — and giving him a quick sad look. “Too bad, gringo,” Ruperto said, grinning crazily despite the wound, “but it looks like we’re short a horse.”

“My toes, my toes!” Robert Jordan cried, trying to stand and falling back again.

Rat-tat. Rat-tat-tat, sang the rifles behind them.

Ruperto and his big woman spoke to their horses and they were gone. So too the flat-faced Indians. Only the old man lingered a moment. Just before he lashed his horse and disappeared, he leaned down in the saddle and gave Robert Jordan a wistful look. “Leche,” he said, abbreviating the curse, “but isn’t war a bitch.”

(1987)

THE APE LADY IN RETIREMENT

Somehow, she found herself backed up against the artichoke display in the fruit-and-vegetable department at Waldbaum’s, feeling as lost and hopeless as an orphan. She was wearing her dun safari shorts and matching workshirt; the rhino-hide sandals she’d worn at the Makoua Reserve clung to the soles of her pale splayed tired old feet. Outside the big plate-glass windows, a sullen, grainy snow had begun to fall.

Maybe that was it, the snow. She was fretting over the vegetables, fumbling with her purse, the grocery list, the keys to the rheumatic Lincoln her sister had left her, when she glanced up and saw it, this wonder, this phenomenon, this dishwater turned to stone, and for the life of her she didn’t know what it was. And then it came to her, the word chipped from the recesses of her memory like an old bone dug from the sediment: snow. Snow. What had it been — forty years?

She gazed out past the racks of diet cola and facial cream, past the soap-powder display and the thousand garish colors of the products she couldn’t use and didn’t want, and she was lost in a reminiscence so sharp and sudden it was like a blow. She saw her sister’s eyes peering out from beneath the hood of her snowsuit, the drifts piled high over their heads, hot chocolate in a decorated mug, her father cursing as he bent to wrap the chains round the rear wheels of the car … and then the murmur of the market brought her back, the muted din concentrated now in a single voice, and she was aware that someone was addressing her. “Excuse me,” the voice was saying, “excuse me.”

She turned, and the voice took on form. A young man — a boy, really — short, massive across the shoulders, his dead-black hair cut close in a flattop, was standing before her. And what was that in his hand? A sausage of some sort, pepperoni, yes, and another word came back to her. “Excuse me,” he repeated, “but aren’t you Beatrice Umbo?”

She was. Oh, yes, she was — Beatrice Umbo, the celebrated ape lady, the world’s foremost authority on the behavior of chimpanzees in the wild, Beatrice Umbo, come home to Connecticut to retire. She gave him a faint, distant smile of recognition. “Yes,” she said softly, with a trace of the lisp that had clung to her since childhood, “and it’s just terrible.”

“Terrible?” he echoed, and she could see the hesitation in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, grinning unsteadily and thumping the pepperoni against his thigh, “but we read about you in school, in college, I mean. I even read your books, the first one, anyway—Jungle Dawn?”

She couldn’t respond. It was his grin, the way his upper lip pulled back from his teeth and folded over his incisors. He was Agassiz, the very picture of Agassiz, and all of a sudden she was back in the world of leaves, back in the Makoua Reserve, crouched in a huddle of chimps. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course I’m all right,” she snapped, and at that moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the halved cantaloupes. The whites of her eyes were stippled with yellow, her hair was like a fright wig, her face as rutted and seamed as an old saddlebag. Even worse, her skin had the oddest citrus cast to it, a color about midway between the hue of a grapefruit and an orange. She didn’t look well, she knew it. But then what could they expect of a woman who’d devoted her life to science and survived dysentery, malaria, schistosomiasis, hepatitis and sleeping sickness in the process, not to mention the little things like the chiggers that burrow beneath your toenails to lay their eggs. “I mean the fruit,” she said, trying to bite back the lisp. “The fruit is terrible. No yim-yim,” she sighed, gesturing toward the bins of tangerines, kumquats, and pale seedless grapes. “No wild custard apple or tiger peach. They haven’t even got passionfruit.”

The boy glanced down at her cart. There were fifty yams — she’d counted them out herself — six gallons of full-fat milk, and a five-pound block of cheese buried in its depths. All the bananas she could find, ranging in color from burnished green to putrescent black, were piled on top in a great towering pyramid that threatened to drop the bottom out of the thing. “They’ve got Italian chestnuts,” he offered, looking up again and showing off his teeth in that big tentative grin. “And in a month or so they’ll get those little torpedo-shaped things that come off the cactuses out west — prickly pear, that’s what they call them.”

She cocked her head to give him an appreciative look. “You’re very sweet,” she said, the lisp creeping back into her voice. “But you don’t understand — I’ve got a visitor coming. A permanent visitor. And he’s very particular about what he eats.”

“I’m Howie Kantner,” he said suddenly. “My father and me run Kantner Construction?”

She’d been in town less than a week, haunting the chilly cavernous house her mother had left her sister and her sister had left her. She’d never heard of Kantner Construction.

The boy ducked his head as if he were genuflecting, told her how thrilled he was to meet her, and turned to go — but then he swung back round impulsively. “Couldn’t you:.. I mean, do you think you’ll need some help with all those bananas?”

She pursed her lips.

“I just thought … the boxboys are the pits here and you’re so … casually dressed for the weather and all …”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “yes, that would be very nice,” and she smiled. She was pleased, terribly pleased. A moment earlier she’d felt depressed, out of place, an alien in her own hometown, and now she’d made a friend. He waited for her behind the checkout counter, this hulking, earnest college boy, this big post-adolescent male with the clipped brow and squared shoulders, and she beamed at him till her gums ached, wondering what he’d think if she told him he reminded her of a chimp.

Konrad was late. They’d told her three, but it was past five already and there was no sign of him. She huddled by the fire, draped in an afghan she’d found in a trunk in the basement, and listened to the clank and wheeze of the decrepit old oil burner as it switched itself fitfully on and off. It was still snowing, snow like a curse, and she wished she were back in her hut at Makoua with the monsoon hammering at the roof. She looked out the window and thought she was on the moon.

It was close to seven when the knock at the door finally came. She’d been dozing, the notes for her lecture series scattered like refuse at her feet, the afghan drawn up tight around her throat. Clutching the title page as if it were a lifejacket tossed her on a stormy sea, she rose from the chair with a click of her arthritic knees and crossed the room to the door.

Though she’d swept the porch three times, the wind kept defeating her efforts, and when she’d pulled back the door she found Konrad standing in a drift up to his knees. He was huge — far bigger than she’d expected — and the heavy jacket, scarf, and gloves exaggerated the effect. His trainer or keeper or whatever she was stood behind him, grinning weirdly, her arms laden with groceries. Konrad was grinning too, giving her the low closed grin she’d been the first to describe in the wild: it meant he was agitated but not yet stoked to the point of violence. His high-pitched squeals—eeeee! eeeee! eeeee! — filled the hallway.

“Miss Umbo?” the girl said, as Konrad, disdaining introductions, flung his knuckles down on the hardwood floor and scampered for the fire. “I’m Jill,” the girl said, trying simultaneously to shake hands, pass through the doorframe, and juggle the bags of groceries.

Beatrice was still trying to get over the shock of seeing a chimpanzee in human dress — and one so huge: he must have stood better than four and a half feet and weighed close to 180—and it was a moment before she could murmur a greeting and offer to take one of the bags of groceries. The door slammed shut and the girl followed her into the kitchen while Konrad slapped his shoulders and stamped round the fireplace.

“He’s so … so big,” Beatrice said, depositing the bag on the oak table in the kitchen.

“I guess,” the girl said, setting her bags down with a shrug.

“And what is all this?” Beatrice gestured at the groceries. She caught a glance of Konrad through the archway that led into the living room: he’d settled into her armchair and was studiously bent over her notes, tearing the pages into thin white strips with the delicate tips of his black leather fingers.

“Oh, this,” the girl said, brightening. “This is the stuff he likes to eat,” dipping into the near bag and extracting one box after another as if they were exhibits at a trial, “Carnation Instant Breakfast, cheese nachos, Fruit Roll-Ups, Sugar Daffies …”

“Are you—?” Beatrice hesitated, wondering how to phrase the question. “What I mean is, you’re his trainer, I take it?”

The girl must have been in her mid-twenties, though she looked fourteen. Her hair was limp and blond, her eyes too big for her face. She was wearing faded jeans, a puffy down vest over a flannel shirt, and a pair of two-hundred-dollar hiking boots. “Me?” she squealed, and then she blushed. Her voice dropped till it was nearly inaudible: “I’m just the person that cleans up his cage and all and I’ve always had this like way with animals….”

Beatrice was shocked. Shocked and disgusted. It was worse than she’d suspected. When she agreed to take Konrad, she knew she’d be saving him from the sterility of a cage, from the anomie and humiliation of the zoo. And those were the very terms—anomie and humiliation—she’d used on the phone with his former trainer, with the zookeeper himself. For Konrad was no run-of-the-mill chimp snatched from the jungle and caged for the pleasure of the big bland white apes who lined up to gawk at him and make their little jokes at the expense of his dignity — though that would have been crime enough — no, he was special, extraordinary, a chimp made after the image of man.

Raised as a human, in one of those late-sixties experiments Beatrice deplored, he’d been bathed, dressed, and pampered, taught to use cutlery and sit at a table, and he’d mastered 350 of the hand signals that constituted American Sign Language. (This last especially appalled her — at one time he could actually converse, or so they said.) But when he grew into puberty at the age of seven, when he developed the iron musculature and crackling sinews of the adolescent male who could reduce a room of furniture to detritus in minutes or snap the femur of a linebacker as if it were tinder, it was abruptly decided that he could be human no more. They took away his trousers and shoes, his stuffed toys and his color TV, and the overseers of the experiment made a quiet move to shift him to the medical laboratories for another, more sinister, sort of research. But he was famous by then and the public outcry landed him in the zoo instead, where they made a sort of clown of him, isolating him from the other chimps and dressing him up like something in a toy-store window. There he’d languished for twenty-five years, neither chimp nor man.

Twenty-five years. And with people like this moon-eyed incompetent to look after him. It was a shock. “You mean to tell me you’ve had no training?” Beatrice demanded, the outrage constricting her throat till she could barely choke out the words. “None at all?”

The girl gave her a meek smile and a shrug of the shoulders.

“You’ve had nutritional training, certainly — you must have studied the dietary needs of the wild chimpanzee, at the very least …” and she gestured disdainfully at the bags of junk food, of salt and fat and empty calories.

The girl murmured something, some sort of excuse or melioration, but Beatrice never heard it. A sudden movement from the front room caught her eye, and all at once she remembered Konrad. She turned away from the girl as if she didn’t exist and focused her bright narrow eyes on him, the eyes that had captured every least secret of his wild cousins, the rapt unblinking eyes of the professional voyeur.

The first thing she noticed was that he’d finished with her notes, the remnants of which lay strewn about the room like confetti. She saw too that he was calm now, at home already, sniffing at the afghan as if he’d known it all his life. Oblivious to her, he settled into the armchair, draped the afghan over his knees, and began fumbling through the pockets of his overcoat like an absent-minded commuter. And then, while her mouth fell open and her eyes narrowed to pinpricks, he produced a cigar — a fine, green, tightly rolled panatela — struck a match to light it, and lounged back in an. aureole of smoke, his feet, bereft now of the plastic galoshes, propped up luxuriously on the coffee table.

It was a night of stinging cold and subarctic wind, but though the panes rattled in their frames, the old house retained its heat. Beatrice had set the thermostat in the high eighties and she’d built the fire up beneath a cauldron of water that steamed the walls and windows till they dripped like the myriad leaves of the rain forest. Konrad was naked” as nature and evolution had meant him to be, and Beatrice was in the clean, starched khakis she’d worn in the bush for the past forty years. Potted plants — cane, ficus, and dieffenbachia — crowded the hallway, spilled from the windowsills, and softened the corners of each of the downstairs rooms. In the living room, the TV roared at full volume, and Konrad stood before it, excited, signing at the screen and emitting a rising series of pant hoots: “Hoo-hoo, hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo!”

Watching from the kitchen, Beatrice felt her face pucker with disapproval. This TV business was no good, she thought, languidly stirring vegetables into a pot of chicken broth. Chimps had an innate dignity, an eloquence that had nothing to do with sign language, gabardine, color TV, or nacho chips, and she was determined to restore it to him. The junk food was in the trash, where it belonged, along with the obscene little suits of clothes the girl had foisted on him, and she’d tried unplugging the TV set, but Konrad was too smart for her. Within thirty seconds he’d got it squawking again.

“Eee-eee!” he shouted now, slapping his palms rhythmically on the hardwood floor.

“Awright,” the TV said in its stentorian voice, “take the dirty little stool pigeon out back and extoiminate him.”

It was an unfortunate thing for the TV to say, because it provoked in Konrad a reaction that could only be described as a frenzy. Whereas before he’d been excited, now he was enraged. “Wraaaaa!” he screamed in a pitch no mere human could duplicate, and he charged the screen with a stick of firewood, every hair on his body sprung instantly erect. Good, she thought, stirring her soup as he flailed at the oak-veneer cabinet and choked the voice out of it, good, good, good, as he backed away and bounced round the room like a huge India-rubber ball, the stick slapping behind him, his face contorted in a full open grin of incendiary excitement. Twice over the sofa, once up the banister, and then he charged again, the stick beating jerkily at the floor. The crash of the screen came almost as a relief to her — at least there’d be no more of that. What puzzled her, though, what arrested her hand in mid-stir, was Konrad’s reaction. He stood stock-still a moment, then backed off, pouting and tugging at his lower lip, the screams tapering to a series of squeaks and whimpers of regret.

The moment the noise died, Beatrice became aware of another sound, low-pitched and regular, a signal it took her a moment to identify: someone was knocking at the door. Konrad must have heard it too. He looked up from the shattered cabinet and grunted softly, “Urk,” he said, “urk, urk,” and lifted his eyes to Beatrice’s as she backed away from the stove and wiped her hands on her apron.

Who could it be, she wondered, and what must they have thought of all that racket? She hung her apron on a hook, smoothed back her hair, and passed into the living room, neatly sidestepping the wreckage of the TV. Konrad’s eyes followed her as she stepped into the foyer, flicked on the porch light, and swung back the door.

“Hello? Miss Umbo?”

Two figures stood bathed in yellow light before her, hominids certainly, and wrapped in barbaric bundles of down, fur, and machine-stitched nylon. “Yes?”

“I hope you don’t … I mean, you probably don’t remember me,” said the squatter of the two figures, removing his knit cap to reveal the stiff black brush cut beneath, “but we met a couple weeks ago at Waldbaum’s? I’m Howie, Howie Kantner?”

Agassiz, she thought, and she saw his unsteady grin replicated on the face of the figure behind him.

“I hope it isn’t an imposition, but this is my father, Howard,” and the second figure, taller, less bulky in the shoulders, stepped forward with a slouch and an uneasy shift of his eyes that told her he was no longer the dominant male. “Pleased to meet you,” he said in a voice ruined by tobacco.

She was aware of Konrad behind her — he’d pulled himself into the precarious nest he’d made in the coat tree of mattress stuffing and strips of carpeting from the downstairs hallway — and her social graces failed her. She didn’t think to ask them in out of the cold till Howie spoke again. “I–I was wondering,” he stammered, “my father’s a big fan of yours, if you would sign a book for him?”

Smile, she told herself, and the command influenced her facial muscles. Ask them to come in. “Come in,” she said, “please,” and then she made a banal comment about the weather.

In they came, stamping and shaking and picking at their clothing, massive but obsequious, a barrage of apologies—“so late”; “we’re not intruding?”; “did she mind?”—exploding around them. They exchanged a glance and wrinkled up their noses at the potent aroma and high visibility of Konrad. Howard Sr. clutched his book, a dog-eared paper edition of The Wellsprings of Man. From his coat tree, which Beatrice had secured to the high ceilings with a network of nylon tow rope, Konrad grunted softly. “No, not at all,” she heard herself saying, and then she asked them if they’d like a cup of hot chocolate or tea.

Seated in the living room and divested of their impressive coats and ponderous boots, scarves, gloves, and hats, father and son seemed subdued. They tried not to look at the ruined TV or at the coat tree or the ragged section of bare plaster where Konrad had stripped the flowered wallpaper to get at the stale but piquant paste beneath. Howie was having the hot chocolate; Howard Sr., the tea. “So how do you like our little town?” Howard Sr. asked as she settled into the armchair opposite him.

She hadn’t uttered a word to a human being since Konrad’s companion had left, and she was having difficulty with the amenities expected of her. Set her down amidst a convocation of chimps or even a troop of baboons and she’d never commit a faux pas or gaucherie, but here she felt herself on uncertain ground. “Hate it,” she said.

Howard Sr. seemed to mull this over, while unbeknownst to him, Konrad was slipping down from the coat tree and creeping up at his back. “Is it that bad,” he said finally, “or is it the difference between Connecticut and the, the—” He was interrupted by the imposition of a long, sinuous, fur-cloaked arm which snaked under his own to deftly snatch a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Before he could react, the arm was gone. “Eeeee!” screamed Konrad, “eeeeeeee!” and he retreated to the coat tree with his booty.

Beatrice rose immediately to her feet, ignoring the sharp pain that ground at her kneecaps, and marched across the room. She wouldn’t have it, one of her chimps indulging a filthy human habit. Give it here, she wanted to say, but then she wouldn’t have one of her chimps responding to human language either, as if he were some fawning lapdog or neutered cat. “Whoo-oo-oogh,” she coughed at him.

“Wraaaaa!” he screamed back, bouncing down from his perch and careening round the room in a threat display, the cigarettes clutched tightly to his chest. She circled him warily, aware that Howie and his father loomed behind her now, their limbs loose, faces set hard. “Miss Umbo,” Howie’s voice spoke at her back, “do you need any help there?”

It was then that Konrad tore round the room again — up over the couch, the banister, up the ropes and down — and Howard Sr. made a calculated grab for him. “No!” Beatrice cried, but the warning was superfluous: Konrad effortlessly eluded the old man’s clumsy swipe, bounced twice, and was back up in the coat tree before he could blink his eyes.

“Heh, heh,” Howard Sr. laughed from the top of his throat, “frisky little fella, isn’t he?”

Beatrice stood before him, trying to catch her breath. “You don’t,” she began, wondering how to put it, “you don’t want to, uh, obstruct him when he displays.”

Howie, the son, looked bemused.

“You don’t, I think, appreciate the strength of this creature. A chimpanzee — a full-grown male, as Konrad is — is at least three times as strong as his human counterpart. Now certainly, I’m sure he wouldn’t deliberately hurt anyone—”

“Hurt us?” Howie exclaimed, involuntarily flexing his shoulders. “I mean, he barely comes up to my chest.”

A contented grunt escaped Konrad at that moment. He lay sprawled in his nest, the rubbery soles of his prehensile feet blackly dangling. He’d wadded up the entire pack of cigarettes and tucked it beneath his lower lip. Now he extracted the wad of tobacco and paper, sniffed it with an appreciative roll of his eyes, and replaced it between cheek and gum. Beatrice sighed. She looked at Howie, but didn’t have the strength to respond.

Later, while Konrad snored blissfully from his perch and the boy and his father had accepted first one bowl of chicken soup and then another, and the conversation drew away from the prosaic details of Beatrice’s life in Connecticut — and did she know Tiddy Brohmer and Harriet Dillers? — and veered instead toward Makoua and the Umbo Primate Center, Howard Sr. brought up the subject of airplanes. He flew, and so did his son. He’d heard about the bush pilots in Africa and wondered about her experience of them.

Beatrice was so surprised she had to set down her tea for fear of spilling it. “You fly?” she repeated.

Howard Sr. nodded and leveled his keen glistening gaze on her. “Twenty-two hundred and some-odd hours’ worth,” he said. “And Howie. He’s a regular fanatic. Got his license when he was sixteen, and since we bought the Cessna there’s hardly a minute when he’s on the ground.”

“I love it,” Howie asserted, crouched over his massive thighs on the very edge of the chair. “I mean, it’s my whole life. When I get out of school I want to restore classic aircraft. I know a guy who’s got a Stearman.”

Beatrice warmed up her smile. All at once she was back in Africa, 2,500 feet up, the land spread out like a mosaic at her feet. Champ, her late husband, had taken to planes like a chimp to trees, and though she’d never learned to fly herself, she’d spent whole days at a time in the air with him, spying out chimp habitat in the rich green forests of Cameroon, the Congo, and Zaire or coasting above the golden veldt to some distant, magical village in the hills. She closed her eyes a moment, overcome with the intensity of the recollection. Champ, Makoua, the storms and sunsets and the close, savage, unimpeachable society of the apes — it was all lost to her, lost forever.

“Miss Umbo?” Howie was peering into her eyes with an expression of concern, the same expression he’d worn that afternoon in Waldbaum’s when he’d asked if she needed help with the bananas.

“Miss Umbo,” he repeated, “anytime you want to see Connecticut from the air, just you let me know.”

“That’s very kind of you,” she said.

“Really,” and he grinned Agassiz’s grin, “it’d be a pleasure.”

Things were sprouting from the dead dun earth — crocuses, daffodils, nameless buds and strange pale fingertips of vegetation — by the time the first of her scheduled lectures came round. It was an evening lecture, open to the public, and held in the Buffon Memorial Auditorium of the State University. Her topic was “Tool Modification in the Chimps of the Makoua Reserve,” and she’d chosen fifty color slides for illustration. For a while she’d debated wearing one of the crepe-de-chine dresses her sister had left hanging forlornly in the closet, but in the end she decided to stick with the safari shorts.

As the auditorium began to fill, she stood rigid behind the curtain, deaf to the chatter of the young professor who was to introduce her. She watched the crowd gather — blank-faced housewives and their paunchy husbands, bearded professors, breast-thumping students, the stringy, fur-swathed women of the Anthropology Club — watched them command their space, choose their seats, pick at themselves, and wriggle in their clothing. “I’ll keep it short,” the young professor was saying, “some remarks about your career in general and the impact of your first two books, then maybe two minutes on Makoua and the Umbo Primate Center, is that all right?” Beatrice didn’t respond. She was absorbed in the dynamics of the crowd, listening to their chatter, observing their neck-craning and leg-crossing, watching the furtive plumbing of nostrils and sniffing of armpits, the obsessive fussing with hair and jewelry. Howie and his father were in the second row. By the time she began, it was standing room only.

It went quite well at first — she had that impression, anyway. She was talking of what she knew better than anyone else alive, and she spoke with a fluency and grace she couldn’t seem to summon at Waldbaum’s or the local Exxon station. She watched them — fidgeting, certainly, but patient and intelligent, all their primal needs — their sexual urges, the necessity of relieving themselves and eating to exhaustion — sublimated beneath the spell of her words. Agassiz, she told them about Agassiz, the first of the wild apes to let her groom him, dead twenty years now. She told them of Spenser and Leakey and Darwin, of Lula, Pout, and Chrysalis. She described how Agassiz had fished for termites with the stem of a plant he’d stripped of leaves, how Lula had used a stick to force open the concrete bunkers in which the bananas were stored, and how Clint, the dominant male, had used a wad of leaves as a spoon to dip the brains from the shattered skull of a baby baboon.

The problem arose when she began the slide show. For some reason, perhaps because the medium so magnified the size of the chimps and he felt himself wanting in comparison, Konrad threw a fit. (She hadn’t wanted to bring him, but the last time she’d left him alone he’d switched on all the burners of the stove, overturned and gutted the refrigerator, and torn the back door from its hinges — all this prior to committing a rash of crimes, ranging from terrorizing Mrs. Binchy’s Doberman to crushing and partially eating a still-unidentified angora kitten.) He’d been sitting just behind the podium, slouched in a folding chair around which Doris Beatts, the young professor, had arranged an array of fruit, including a basket of yim-yim flown in for the occasion. “Having him onstage is a terrific idea,” she’d gushed, pumping Beatrice’s hand and flashing a zealot’s smile that showed off her pink and exuberant gums. “What could be better? It’ll give the audience a real frisson, having a live chimp sitting there.”

Yes, it gave them a frisson, all right.

Konrad had been grunting softly to himself and working his way happily through the yim-yim, but no sooner had the lights been dimmed and the first slide appeared than he was up off the chair with a shriek of outrage. Puffed to twice his size, he swayed toward the screen on his hind legs, displaying at the gigantic chimp that had suddenly materialized out of the darkness. “Wraaaaa!” he screamed, dashing the chair to pieces and snatching up one of its jagged legs to whirl over his head like a club. There was movement in the front row. A murmur of concern — concern, not yet fear — washed through the crowd. “Woo-oooogh,” Beatrice crooned, trying to calm him. “It’s all right,” she heard herself saying through the speakers that boomed her voice out over the auditorium. But it wasn’t all right. She snapped to the next slide, a close-up of Clint sucking termites from a bit of straw, and Konrad lost control, throwing himself at the screen with a screech that brought the audience to its feet.

Up went the lights. To an individual, the audience was standing. Beatrice didn’t have time to catalogue their facial expressions, but they ran the gamut from amusement to shock, terror, and beyond. One woman — heavyset, with arms like Christmas turkeys and black little deepset eyes — actually cried out as if King Kong himself had broken loose. And Konrad? He stood bewildered amidst the white tatters of the screen, his fur gone limp again, his knuckles on the floor. For a moment, Beatrice actually thought he looked embarrassed.

Later, at the reception, people crowded round him and he took advantage of the attention to shamelessly cadge cigarettes, plunder the canape trays, and guzzle Coca-Cola as if it were spring water. Beatrice wanted to put a stop to it — he was demeaning himself, the clown in the funny suit with his upturned palm thrust through the bars of his cage — but the press around her was terrific. Students and scholars, a man from the local paper, Doris Beatts and her neurasthenic husband, the Kantners, father and son, all bombarding her with questions: Would she go back? Was it for health reasons she’d retired? Did she believe in UFOs? Reincarnation? The New York Yankees? How did it feel having a full-grown chimp in the house? Did she know Vlastos Reizek’s monograph on the seed content of baboon feces in the Kalahari? It was almost ten o’clock before Konrad turned away to vomit noisily in the corner and Howie Kantner, beaming sunnily and balancing half a plastic cup of warm white wine on the palm of one hand, asked her when they were going to go flying.

“Soon,” she said, watching the crowd part as Konrad, a perplexed look on his face, bent to lap up the sour overflow of his digestive tract.

“How about tomorrow?” Howie said.

“Tomorrow,” Beatrice repeated, struck suddenly with the scent of the rain forest, her ears ringing with the call of shrike and locust and tree toad. “Yes,” she lisped, “that would be nice.”

Konrad was subdued the next day. He spent the early morning halfheartedly tearing up the carpet in the guest room, then brooded over his nuts and bananas, all the while pinning Beatrice with an accusatory look, a look that had nacho chips and Fruit Roll-Ups written all over it. Around noon, he dragged himself across the floor like a hundred-year-old man and climbed wearily into his nest. Beatrice felt bad, but she wasn’t about to give in. They’d made him schizophrenic — neither chimp nor man — and if there was pain involved in reacquainting him with his roots, with his true identity, there was nothing she could do about it. Besides, she was feeling schizophrenic herself. Konrad was a big help — the smell of him, the silken texture of his fur as she groomed him, the way he scratched around in the basement when he did his business — but still she felt out of place, still she missed Makoua with an ache that wouldn’t go away, and as the days accumulated like withered leaves at her feet, she found herself wishing she’d stayed on there to die.

Howie appeared at ten of three, his rust-eaten Datsun rumbling at the curb, the omnipresent grin on his lips. It was unseasonably warm for mid-April and he wore a red T-shirt that showed off the extraordinary development of his pectorals, deltoids, and biceps; a blue windbreaker was flung casually over one shoulder. “Miss Umbo,” he boomed as she answered the door, “it’s one perfect day for flying. Visibility’s got to be twenty-five miles or more. You ready?”

She was. She’d been looking forward to it, in fact. “I hope you don’t mind if I bring Konrad along,” she said.

Howie’s smile faded for just an instant. Konrad stood at her side, his lower lip unfurled in a pout. “Hoo-hoo,” he murmured, eyes meek and round. Howie regarded him dubiously a moment, and then the grin came back. “Sure,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t see why not.”

It was a twenty-minute ride to the airport. Beatrice stared out the window at shopping centers, car lots, Burger King and Stereo City, at cemeteries that stretched as far as she could see. Konrad sat in back, absorbed in plucking cigarette butts from the rear ashtray and making a neat little pile of them on the seat beside him. Howie was oblivious. He kept up a steady stream of chatter the whole way, talking about airplanes mostly, but shading into his coursework at school and how flipped out his anthro prof would be when she heard he was taking Beatrice flying. For her part, Beatrice was content to let the countryside flash by, murmuring an occasional “Yes” or “Uh-huh” when Howie paused for breath.

The airport was tiny, two macadam strips in a grassy field, thirty or forty airplanes lined up in ragged rows, a cement-block building the size of her basement. A sign over the door welcomed them to Arkbelt Airport. Howie pushed the plane out onto the runway himself and helped Beatrice negotiate the high step up into the cockpit. Konrad clambered into the back and allowed Beatrice to fasten his seatbelt. For a long while they sat on the ground, as Howie, grinning mechanically, revved the engine and checked this gauge or that.

The plane was a Cessna 182, painted a generic orange and white and equipped with dual controls, autopilot, a storm scope, and four cramped vinyl seats. It was about what she’d expected — a little shinier and less battered than Champ’s Piper, but no less noisy or bone-rattling. Howie gunned the engine and the plane jolted down the runway with an apocalyptic roar, Beatrice clinging to the plastic handgrip till she could taste her breakfast in the back of her throat. But then they lifted off like gods, liberated from the grip of the earth, and Connecticut swelled beneath them, revealing the drift and flow of its topology and the hidden patterns of its dismemberment.

“Beautiful,” she screamed over the whine of the engine.

Howie worked the flaps and drew the yoke toward him. They banked right and rose steadily. “See that out there?” he shouted, pointing out her window to where the ocean threw the sky back at them. “Long Island Sound.”

From just behind her, Konrad said: “Wow-wow, er-er-er-er!” The smell of him, in so small a confine, was staggering.

“You want to sightsee here,” Howie shouted, “maybe go over town and look for your house and the university and all, or do you want to go out over the Island a ways and then circle back?”

She was dazzled, high in the empyrean, blue above, blue below. “The Island,” she shouted, exhilarated, really exhilarated, for the first time since she’d left Africa.

Howie leveled off the plane and the tan lump of Long Island loomed ahead of them. “Great, huh?” he shouted, gesturing toward the day like an impresario, like the man who’d made it. Beatrice beamed at him, “Woooo!” Howie said, pinching his nostrils and making an antic face. “He’s ripe today, Konrad, isn’t he?”

“Forty years,” Beatrice laughed, proud of Konrad, proud of the stink, proud of every chimp she’d ever known, and proud of this boy Howie too — why, he was nothing but a big chimp himself. It was then — while she was laughing, while Howie mugged for her and she began to feel almost whole for the first time since she’d left Makoua — that the trouble began. Like most trouble, it arose out of a misunderstanding. Apparently, Konrad had saved one of the butts from Howie’s car, and when he reached out nimbly to depress the cigarette lighter, Howie, poor Howie, thought he was going for the controls and grabbed his wrist.

A mistake.

“No!” Beatrice cried, and immediately the tug of war spilled over into her lap. “Let go of him!”

“Eeeee! Eeeee!” Konrad shrieked, his face distended in the full open grin of high excitement, already stoked to violence. She felt the plane dip out from under her as Howie, his own face gone red with the rush of blood, struggled to keep it on course with one hand while fighting back Konrad with the other. It was no contest. Konrad slipped Howie’s grasp and then grabbed his wrist, as if to say, “How do you like it?”

“Get off me, goddamnit!” Howie bellowed, but Konrad didn’t respond. Instead, he jerked Howie’s arm back so swiftly and suddenly it might have been the lever of a slot machine; even above the noise of the engine, Beatrice could hear the shoulder give, and then Howie’s bright high yelp of pain filled the compartment. In the next instant Konrad was in front, in the cockpit, dancing from Beatrice’s lap to Howie’s and back again, jerking at the controls, gibbering and hooting and loosing his bowels in a frenzy like nothing she’d ever seen.

“Son of a bitch!” Howie was working up a frenzy of his own, the plane leaping and bucking as he punched in the autopilot and hammered at the chimp with his left hand, the right dangling uselessly, his eyes peeled back in terror. “Hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo!” Konrad hooted, spewing excrement and springing into Beatrice’s lap. For an instant he paused to shoot Howie a mocking glance and then he snatched the yoke to his chest and the plane shot up with a clattering howl while Howie flailed at him with the heavy meat of his fist.

Konrad took the first two blows as if he didn’t notice them, then abruptly dropped the yoke, the autopilot kicking in to level them off. Howie hit him again and Beatrice knew she was going to die. “Er-er,” Konrad croaked experimentally, and Howie, panic in his face, hit him again. And then, as casually as he might have reached out for a yam or banana, Konrad returned the blow and the plane jerked with the force of it. “Wraaaaa!” Konrad screamed, but Howie didn’t hear him. Howie was unconscious. Unconscious, and smeared with shit. And now, delivering the coup de grace, Konrad sprang to his chest, snatched up his left hand — the hand that had pummeled him — and bit off the thumb. A snap of the jaws and it was gone. Howie’s heart pumped blood to the wound.

In that moment — the moment of Howie’s disfigurement — Beatrice’s own heart turned over in her chest. She looked at Konrad, perched atop poor Howie, and at Howie, who even in repose managed to favor Agassiz. They were beyond Long Island now, headed out to sea, high over the Atlantic. Champ had tried to teach her to fly, but she’d had no interest in it. She looked at the instrument panel and saw nothing. For a moment the idea of switching on the radio came into her head, but then she glanced at Konrad and thought better of it.

Konrad was looking into her eyes. The engine hummed, Howie’s head fell against the door, the smell of Konrad — his body, his shit — filled her nostrils. They had five hours’ flying time, give or take a few minutes, that much she knew. She looked out over the nose of the plane to where the sea swallowed up the rim of the world. Africa was out there, distant and serene, somewhere beyond the night that fell like an ax across the horizon. She could almost taste it.

“Urk,” Konrad said, and he was still looking at her. His eyes were soft now, his breathing regular. He sat atop Howie in a forlorn slouch, the cigarette forgotten, the controls irrelevant, nothing at all. “Urk,” he repeated, and she knew what he wanted, knew in a rush of comprehension that took her all the way back to Makoua and that first, long-ago touch of Agassiz’s strange spidery fingers.

She held his eyes. The engine droned. The sea beneath them seemed so still you could walk on it, so soft you could wrap yourself up in it. She reached out and touched his hand. “Urk,” she said.

(1988)

DE RERUM NATURA

The inventor is in his laboratory, white smock, surgical mask, running afoul of the laws of nature. Schlaver and Una Moss are with him, bent over the Petri dishes and dissecting pans like conspirators. Overhead, the hum of the fluorescent lights.

He snaps his hands into the rubber gloves, flashes the scalpel. His touch is quick, sure, steady as a laser. The blade eases through the shaved skin of the abdomen, his fingers flutter, vessels are clamped, ligatures tied. Una is there, assisting with sponges and retractors. The Inventor’s eyes burn over the mask like the eyes of an Arab terrorist. A single sweatpearl stands on his forehead. Strapped to the table before him, teats sleepy with milk, irises sinking, the sedated sow gargles through her crusted nostrils, stirs a bristling hock. Una pats the pink hoof.

Then he is speaking, the tones measured, smooth, the phrases clipped. Schlaver moves in, draws off the amniotic fluid. Una takes the forceps, offers the scalpel. The Inventor slits the sack, reaches in, pulls his prize from the steaming organs. He slaps the wet nates: the wrinkled little creature shrieks, and then again, its electric wail poking into mason jars, behind filing cabinets, rattling the loose screws in the overhead lights. Una and Schlaver tear off their masks and cheer. The Inventor hefts his latest coup, a nine-pound-three-ounce boy, red as a ham and perfect in every detail: his firstborn son and heir. The black eyes grin above the mask.

From The Life:

To say merely that he was a prodigy would mock the insufficiency of language. At five he was teaching in the temple. By age seven he had built his first neutron smasher, developed a gnat-sized bugging device that could pick up a whispered conversation at two miles and simultaneously translate it into any one of thirteen languages, and devised a sap-charging system which fomented rapid growth in deciduous trees of the temperate zone.* At nine he was admitted to MIT, where he completed advanced degrees in physics and mathematics prior to his thirteenth year. During the course of the next eleven months he studied surgical medicine at Johns Hopkins.

At fifteen he stunned the world with his first great advance, the stoolless cat, which brought him the financial independence to sustain his subtler and more meaningful future work. Through an accelerated but painstaking process of selective breeding he had overseen the evolution of a strain of common housecat — the usual attributes intact — which never in the course of its normal lifespan was actuated by the physiological demands of micturition or defecation. Within six months after its introduction the major producers of cat litter had thrown in the towel and pet shops were opening next to every liquor store in the country. His photograph (contemplative, the horn-rims) appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Time during the same week. He was hailed. “An Edison for the Seventies,” “The Pragmatist’s Einstein,” they said. Housewives clamored. The Russians awarded him the Star of Novgorod. Encouraged, he went on to develop the limbless, headless, tailless strain that has since become an international institution. A tribute to his disinterestedness: “Under no circumstance, no matter how attractive the inducement,” he said, “will I be persuaded to breed out the very minimal essence of the feline — I refer to its purr.”†

He is in his study, musing over the morning’s mail. The mail, corners, edges, inks and stamps like the tails of tropical birds, lies across his desk in a welter. In his hand, the paper knife. He selects an envelope printed in a blue and yellow daisy pattern.

It is a threat.

Next he picks up a business envelope, imprinted with the name and logo (an ascending rocket) of his son’s school: WERNHER VON BRAUN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. It is a letter from his son’s teacher. She is alarmed at what appears to be a worsening deformity of the boy’s feet (so misshapen as almost to resemble hoofs, she says) and hopes that his father will have the matter looked into. She is also concerned with his behavior. The boy has, it seems, been making disruptive noises in the classroom. A sort of whinnying or chuffing. The Inventor carefully folds the letter, tucks it into the pocket of his shirt. At that moment the double doors yawn and Una Moss, in deshabille, ambles in behind the tea cart. Her pet python, weaving a turgid S in the rug behind her, stops at the door.

She pours the Inventor’s tea (two lumps) while he frowns at the mail. As she turns to leave, he speaks. “Una?” She looks, puckers a moue. “What is this business with the boy? It seems he’s been emitting those noises in the schoolroom.” Una’s expression irons to the serious. “We can’t have that,” he says. “Will you speak with him?”

“Of course, pumpkin.”

He looks down again. The door closes behind Una, a gentle click, and he turns back to the mail. A brown-paper parcel catches his eyes. The paper knife makes a neat incision and he extracts the contents: a hardcover book. No letter, no inscription. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. He folds back the page, begins to read.

From The Life:

His second major breakthrough was also a humanitarian effort. A committee from the Gandhi Foundation had come to him asking for a solution to the problem of world hunger. He told them he would consider their petition, though engaged in other projects at the time. That afternoon, while he was rooting through a local wrecking yard in search of a tailpipe replacement for his automobile, the solution rushed on him like a firestorm. “Of course,” he was heard to mutter. He retraced his steps to the proprietor’s blistered shed. There he borrowed a #2 faucet wrench, ball peen hammer and screwdriver. He then removed the tailpipe from a sandwiched auto of identical make and model to his own. This involved twelve minutes, thirty-seven seconds, as near as investigators have been able to determine. In the short space of this time he had worked out the complicated structural formulae which resulted in one of mankind’s biggest boons — that is to say, he discovered the method by which a given tonnage of spotted chrome and rusted steel could be converted to an equivalent weight of porterhouse steak.

He is at Horn & Hardart, surrounded by strangers. The boy sits across from him, head down, heels swinging, fingers fluffed with the meringue from his third slice of pie. Una’s handbag perches like a sentinel at the edge of the table. Suddenly the boy begins to grunt: hurp-hurp-hurp. The Inventor looks uncomfortable. He raises a finger to his lips — but the grunting cracks an octave and the boy pins the plate to the table, begins licking. The Inventor remonstrates. The plate rattles on the Formica. Heads turn. The Inventor stands, looking for Una. Then strides to the bank of tiny windows and stainless steel doors, fishing in his pocket for coins. Behind him the grunting increases in volume. He peers into each window until he finds a slice of lemon meringue pie, yellow sliver, brown peaks. He puts the coins in the slot, tugs at the door. It does not open. He tugs harder, taps at the glass, tries another coin. There is the slap of the boy’s plate on the tiles, and then his angry wail. A middle-aged woman, a stranger, is trying to comfort him. The Inventor’s armpits are moist. He jerks at the door, tries to spring it with his penknife. The howls at his back, the ripe flush of the woman’s face. And then, from the Ladies’ Room, Una. Like a savior. Green eyeshade, black caftan, copper anklets.

From The Life:

The Inventor’s marriage with Roxanne Needelman was never consummated. She was twenty-nine, a laboratory assistant, twice married and widowed. He was eighteen, raw, ingenuous, in the first flush of his monumental success with the stoolless cat. After a disastrous honeymoon at Olduvai Gorge the two set up separate households. Three years later the marriage was terminated. The Inventor, immersed in his work, retired to his estate in northern Westchester.

During the course of the next five years he lived and worked alone, perfecting the Autochef and laying the theoretical groundwork for expanding the minute. On the eve of his twenty-sixth birthday he began his association with Yehudi Schlaver, the German-born physicist who would be with him to the end. Two years later, on a rainy April evening, the front buzzer sounded through the umbrageous corridors of the Westchester mansion. At the door, Una Moss. She was wearing a backpack. Two tote bags lay at her feet. She had followed the Great Man’s career, saved the clippings from over fifty periodicals, and now she had come to live with him. The Inventor stood in the doorway, his brow square as the spine of a book. He pushed open the door.

Una, Schlaver, the Inventor, his son. They stand at the rail of the Dayliner, in identical London Fog overcoats. On their way to Bear Mountain, for an outing. The air like bad breath, sky black, the water thick and dun-colored. An amateur photographer, passing in a small craft, recognizes the celebrated faces and takes a snapshot: Una, eyes shaded in purple, the rock python wrapped under her chin like primordial jewelry and disappearing in the folds of her overcoat, its head visible beneath the sleeve; Schlaver, small, gray, nondescript; the Great Man, his blocklike brow, the creases like chains running deep into the hairline, the black eyes pinched behind the horn-rims, the point of the beard, lank arms, stooped back; and the boy, feet concealed in custom-built boots, ears already growing to the point and peeping like tongues from beneath the bristling hair. Waves lap, the deck rises, dips. Una, Schlaver and the boy wave. The Inventor hangs his head and disgorges the contents of his stomach.

At the dock, the boy darts ahead, repeatedly stumbling in his boots. Schlaver and Una follow, the one taking charge of the Inventor’s compass, calculator and notebooks, the other dragging a picnic basket. The Inventor, sulking, brings up the rear. It begins to drizzle.

A picnic table, prettily reflecting inverted treetops in a sheen of rainwater. The three, collars up, noses dripping, chewing stolidly. In silence. The boy, boots in hand, merrily roots among the wildflowers, nudging at the wet red earth with the bridge of his nose. “Screee-honk-honk,” he says, at intervals. The Inventor looks unutterably depressed. He stands, buckles the belt round his raincoat. “Una. I will take a short walk. I wish to be alone, and to be among the trees and mosses.” He strides off, into the black bank of pine and beech. Continues on, deep in thought. The trees look alike. He loses his way. When night falls, Una and Schlaver become alarmed. They step into the shadows of the first trees and halloo. There is no answer.

In the morning, search parties are organized. Bloodhounds, state police, Boy Scout troops, helicopters, flares. The Governor mobilizes the National Guard. The Vice President flies in. The voice of the Inventor’s mother (a wizened old woman in a babushka) is boomed through enormous loudspeakers. Woodsmen begin felling trees, burning off ground cover. The Inventor has vanished.

Forty days later, Una, who alone has refused to give up the search, is struggling down a slick and rock-strewn slope. Again, rain falls. Again, she wears the overcoat. Again, she accommodates the reptile (the head a comfort in her hand). At the base of the hill, a swamp. Her boots slosh through the clots of algae, heels tug against the suck of the mud. She looks up to flail at a spider web and there he is, squatting naked in a ring of skunk cabbage, his back dancing with mosquito and fly. The glasses are gone, the black eyes crazed and bloodshot. “Here,” she says, and holds out her hand. He looks up at her, confused, then slowly lifts his hand to hers, loses his fingers in the triangular black mouth of the snake.

From The Life:

The now infamous “Bear Mountain Sojourn” marked the decline of the Inventor’s practical humanitarian phase. He called a press conference, announced his intention of permanently retiring to his home in suburban Westchester for the purpose of undertaking his great work, a work which wbuld “spiritually edify the race of men as [his] previous work had materially edified them.” For seven years nothing was heard of him. Of course there were the usual garbage sifters and mail steamers, the reports from the Inventor’s few privileged friends, the speculations of the press. And from time to time paparazzi came up with photographs of the Great Man: brooding on the bedroom fire escape, rooting in the turf with his son, sending up frozen slashes of foam (his slick arm poised) while swimming laps in the pool. Still, he was all but lost to the public eye.

It was during the Seven Years of Silence that a nefarious innovation with enormous market potential appeared briefly in this country and in two Western European nations: a colorless, tasteless liquid, which, when combined with food or drink, reduced the ingestor to a heap of desiccated flakes. When the flakes were moistened, the desiccatee would regain his/her normal structure, totally free of side effects. Abuses of the product were legion.* And though the FDA banned its sale minutes after it was first made available commercially, it was readily obtainable on the black market and even today continues suspect in any number of unsolved kidnappings and missing-persons cases. Rumor attributed its invention to the Great Man. Schlaver read a statement denying his associate’s participation in the development of the chemical and asserting how deeply the Inventor deplored the discovery of a product so potentially pernicious. But rumor is not easily squelched, and the whole affair left a bad taste.

He is dozing in an armchair, three Furballs purring in his lap. In the hall, the sound of his son’s hoofs like a drumbeat on the linoleum. His eyes flutter open, caught in the rift between consciousness and the deeps. He stands. Gropes for his glasses. Una lies asleep on the davenport, the snake coiled round her like a meandering stream. He finds the tail. It stiffens under his fingers, then goes limp. He heaves, fireman and firehose: the coils spin to the carpet. “What’s up?” Una murmurs. He is unbuttoning her smock. The python lies on the floor, dead weight, quietly digesting its bimonthly rabbit. The Inventor climbs atop her, arching over her stiff as a mounted butterfly. “I had a dream,” he says.

From The Life:

It is now known that Una Moss was not the mother of the Inventor’s peculiarly deformed son. In fact, as Sissler and Teebe have shown in The Brewing Storm, their perceptive study of his last years, the Inventor and Miss Moss were never sexually intimate. The reason is simple: the Great Man was impotent.

The son remains a problem.

The Inventor stands in the rain, surrounded by marble monuments: angels, christs, bleeding hearts. Una and the boy at his side. Their overcoats. Bowed heads. The smell of mold, the open hole. The man in black reading from a book.

It is Schlaver’s funeral. Cardiac arrest. The Inventor lingers after the others have gone, the rain slanting down, and watches the attendants as they slap the muddy earth on the coffin, scrape it into the corners, tamp the reddish mound that rises above the grass like bread in a pan. He stands there for a long while, the eyes black, elbow tucked, fist under chin. Suddenly he turns and hurries back to the limousine. Una and the boy are there, the windows fogged. He snaps open his notebook and begins scrawling equations across the page.

Three days later Schlaver is leaning back in an armchair at the Westchester house, surrounded by reporters, lights, TV cameras. He is in his bathrobe, looking much as he did before death. The medical world is astounded. The press calls it a hoax. The Inventor stands in the shadows, grinning.

From The Life:

There were threatening phone calls. Windows were broken. The house egged. The boy came home from school, blood on the seat of his pants. His tail had been clipped. In the shower room. It had been a pink tail, almost translucent, curled in three tight coils like an angleworm, or the breath of a serpent.

The interviewer clears his throat, blows his nose in a checked handkerchief, fiddles with the controls of the portable tape recorder. Una sits cross-legged on the carpet, barefoot, a ring on each toe. She is lining up dominoes on the coffee table, standing them on end in a winding file. The Inventor is in his armchair; he is wearing a flannel shirt, sipping sherry. “And which of your myriad inventions,” says the interviewer, “gives you the greatest personal satisfaction?” The Inventor looks down at the carpet, his fingers massaging the Furball in his lap. The wheels of the recorder whir, faint as the whine of a mosquito. “Those to come,” he says. “Those that exist ab ovo, that represent possibility, moments of chemical reaction, epiphanies great and small. You must see of course that invention makes metaphor a reality, fixes—” but then he is interrupted by the clack of tumbling dominoes, regular as a second hand, beating like a train rushing over a bad spot in the rail. Una looks up, smiling, serene, her lips fat as things stung. The final domino totters. “Yes,” says the Inventor. “Where were we?”

A Jewish star has been burned on his lawn. The Inventor is puzzled. He is not Jewish.

From The Life:

The great work which had brooded so long on the Great Man’s horizon came like Apocalypse. The world’s ears stung. The work was met with cries of outrage, despair, resentment. Never, said his critics, have the hopes, the illusions, the dignity of mankind been so deflated in a single callous swipe. Fact, brutal undeniable naked fact, ate like a canker at all our hearts, they said. Who will reclothe our illusions? they asked. His friends hung their heads and feebly praised his candor. Others persisted in calling it a canard. It was no canard. How he had done it no one could begin to imagine. But there were the formulas for the experts to wonder at, and there, for all the world to see, were the slides. The color slides of God dead.

1) God, his great white beard, gauzy dressing gown, one arm frozen at half-mast. Supine. His mouth agape. Nebular backdrop.

2) A top view. God stretching below the lens like a colossus, purple mountains’ majesty, from sea to shining sea. Cloud foaming over his brow, hissing up from beneath his arms, legs, crotch.

3) The closeup. Eye sockets black, nostrils collapsed, the stained hairs of the beard, lips gone, naked hideous teeth.

Night. Insects scraping their hind legs together, things stirring in the grass. Then the first cries, the flare of the torches. The earthquaking roar of the crowd. His neighbors are in the street, garden rakes and edgers poking over their massed heads, Yorkies and Schnauzers yanking them forward at the ends of leashes. Linked arm in arm, chanting “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” they come on, wrenching the great iron gates from their hinges, crushing through the beds of peonies, the banks of shrubbery, their faces savage and misaligned in the glare of the torches. Then the crash of the windows like a fever, the jeers of the women and children, husky brays of the men. And then the flames licking at the redwood planking, fluttering through the windows to chew at the drapes and carpets. The flash of Molotovs, the thunder of the little red cans of gasoline from a hundred lawn mowers. “Yaaaar!” howls the canaille at the first concussion. “Yaaaar!”

He is there. In the upper window. Una, Schlaver and the boy struggling to reach him from the fire escape. The flames, licking up twenty, thirty feet, framing the window like jagged teeth. The granite forehead, wisp of a beard, black eyes swimming behind the bottle lenses. Suddenly a cloud of smoke, dark as burning rubber, swells up and obscures the window. The crowd roars. When the smoke passes, the window is empty. Una’s scream. Then the groan of the beams, the house collapsing in on itself with a rush of air, the neon cinders shooting high against the black and the stars, like the tails of a thousand Chinese rockets.

(1976)

* The’ oaks and willows shadowing the home of Helmut Holtz, his first tutor, have attained heights in excess of three hundred feet, and continue to grow at an annual rate of nine feet, three and three quarters inches.

† In Finland, for example, a 10.3 annual per capita consumption of the Furballs (pat. trade name) is indicated. At Reykjavik they are sold on the street corner. An American Porno Queen posed nude in a sea of Furballs for a still-controversial spread in a men’s publication. And the Soviet Premier has forgone bedclothes for them. His explanation: “Can you make to purr the electric blanket?”

* A Cincinnati man, J. Leonard Whist, was prosecuted for possession of a controlled substance, intent to do great bodily harm, and bigamy, when police found that he had married four times, desiccated each of his wives, and reconstituted them as the whim took him.

THE EXTINCTION TALES

He was in his early fifties, between jobs, his wife dead ten years. When he saw the position advertised in the Wellington paper it struck him as highly romantic, and he was immediately attracted to it.

LIGHTHOUSEKEEPER. Stephen Island. References.

Inquire T. H. Penn, Maritime Authority.

He took it. Sold his furniture, paid the last of the rent, filled two duffel bags with socks and sweaters and his bird-watcher’s guide, and hired a cart. Just as he was leaving, a neighbor approached him with something in her arms: pointed ears, yellow eyes. Take it, she said. For company. He slipped the kitten into the breast of his pea coat, waved, and started off down the road.

Stephen Island is an eruption of sparsely wooden rock seventeen miles northwest of Wellington. It is uninhabited. At night the constellations wheel over its quarter-mile radius like mythical beasts.

The man was to be relieved for two weeks every six months. He planted a garden, read, fished, smoked by the sea. The cat grew to adolescence. One afternoon it came to him with a peculiar bird clenched in its teeth. The man took the bird away, puzzled over it, and finally sent it to the national museum at Wellington for identification. Three weeks later a reply came. He had discovered a new species: the Stephen Island wren. In the interim the cat had brought him fourteen more specimens of the odd little buff and white bird. The man never saw one of the birds alive. After a while the cat stopped bringing them.

In 1945, when the Russians liberated Auschwitz, they found 129 ovens in the crematorium. The ovens were six feet long, two feet high, one and a half feet wide.

The Union Pacific Railroad had connected New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Ulysses S. Grant was stamping about the White House in hightop boots, Jay Gould was buying up gold and Jared Pink was opening a butcher shop in downtown Chicago.

PINK’S POULTRY, BEEF AND GAME

The town was booming. Barouches and cabriolets at every corner, men in beavers and frock coats lining the steps of the private clubs, women in bustles, bonnets and flounces giving teas and taking boxes at the theater. Thirty-room mansions, friezes, spires, gargoyles, the opera house, the exchange, shops, saloons, tenements. In the hardpan streets men and boys trailed back from the factories, stockyards, docks, their faces mapped in sweat and soot and the blood of animals.

All of them ate meat. Pink provided it. Longhorns from Texas, buffalo from the plains, deer, turkey, pheasant and pigeon from Michigan and Illinois. They stormed his shop, the bell over the door rushing and trilling as they bought up everything he could offer them, right down to the scraps in the brine barrels. Each day he sold out his stock and in the morning found himself at the mercy of his suppliers. A pre-dawn trip to the slaughterhouse for great swinging sides of beef, livers and tripe, blood for pudding, intestine for sausage. And then twice a week to meet the Michigan Line and long low boxcars strung with dressed deer and piled deep with pigeons stinking of death and excrement. Unplucked, their feathers a nightmare, they filled the cars four feet deep and he would bring a boy along to shovel them into his wagon. They sold like a dream.

When his supplier tripled the price per bird Pink sent his brother Seth up to the nesting grounds near Petoskey, Michigan. As Seth’s train approached Petoskey the sky began to darken. He checked his pocket watch: it was three in the afternoon. He leaned over the man beside him to look out the window. The sky was choked with birds, their mass blotting the sun, the drone of their wings and dry rattling feathers audible over the chuff of the engine. Seth whistled. Are those—? he said. Yep, said the man. Passenger pigeons.

Seth wired his brother from the Petoskey station. Two days later he and Jared were stalking the nesting ground with a pair of Smith & Wesson shotguns and a burlap sack. They were not alone. The grove was thronged with hunters, hundreds of them, drinking, shooting, springing traps and tossing nets. Retrievers barked, shotguns boomed. At the far edge of the field women sat beneath parasols with picnic lunches.

Jared stopped to watch an old man assail the crown of a big-boled chestnut with repeated blasts from a brace of shotguns. A grim old woman stood at the man’s elbow, reloading, while two teenagers scrambled over the lower branches of the tree, dropping nestlings to the ground. Another man, surrounded by dirt-faced children, ignited a stick of dynamite and pitched it into a tree thick with roosting birds. A breeze ruffled the leaves as the spitting cylinder twisted through them, pigeons cooing and clucking in the shadows — then there was a flash, and a concussion that thundered over the popping of shotguns from various corners of the field. Heads turned. The smoke blew off in a clot. Feathers, twigs, bits of leaf and a fine red mist began to settle. The children were already beneath the tree, on their hands and knees, snatching up the pigeons and squab as they fell to earth like ripe fruit.

Overhead the sky was stormy with displaced birds. Jared fired one barrel, then the other. Five birds slapped down, two of them stunned and hopping. He rushed them, flailing with the stock of his gun until they lay still. He heard Seth fire behind him. The flock was the sky, shrieking and reeling, panicked, the chalky white excrement like a snowstorm. Jared’s hair and shoulders were thick with it, white spots flecked his face. He was reloading. There’s got to be a better way, he said.

Three weeks later he and his brother returned to Petoskey. They rode out to the nesting grounds in a horse-drawn wagon, towing an old Civil War cannon behind them. In the bed of the wagon lay a weighted hemp net, one hundred feet square, and a pair of cudgels. Strips of cotton broadcloth had been sewed into the center of the net to catch the wind and insure an even descent, but the net fouled on its maiden flight and Seth had to climb a silver maple alive with crepitating pigeons to retrieve it. They refolded the net, stuffed it into the mouth of the cannon, and tried again. This time they were successful: Seth flushed the birds from the tree with a shotgun blast, the cannon roared, and Jared’s net caught them as they rose. Nearly two thousand pigeons lay tangled in the mesh, their distress calls echoing through the trees, metallic and forlorn. The two brothers stalked over the grounded net with their cudgels, crushing the heads of the survivors. When the net had ceased to move and the blood had begun to settle into abstract patterns in the broadcloth, they dropped their cudgels and embraced, hooting and laughing like prospectors on a strike. We’ll be rich! Seth shouted.

He was right. Within six months PINK’S POULTRY, BEEF AND GAME was turning over as many as seventeen thousand pigeons a day, and Jared opened a second and then a third shop before the year was out. Seth oversaw the Petoskey operation and managed one of the new shops. Two years later Jared opened a restaurant and a clothing store and began investing in a small Ohio-based petroleum company called Standard Oil. By 1885 he was worth half a million dollars and living in an eighteen-room mansion in Highland Park, just down the street from his brother Seth.

On a September afternoon in 1914, when Jared Pink was seventy-two, a group of ornithologists was gathered around a cage at the Cincinnati zoo. Inside the cage was a passenger pigeon named Martha, and she was dying of old age. The bird gripped the wire mesh with her beak and stiffened. She was the last of her kind on earth.

The variola virus, which causes smallpox, cannot exist outside the human body. It is now, as the result of pandemic immunization, on the verge of extinction.

Numerous other lifeforms have disappeared in this century, among them the crested shelduck, Carolina parakeet, Kittlitz’s thrust, Molokai oo, huia, Toolach wallaby, freckled marsupial mouse, Syrian wild ass, Schomburgk’s deer, rufous gazelle, bubal hartebeest and Caucasian wisent.

George Robertson was infused with the spirit of Christianity. When he arrived in Tasmania in 1835, the island’s autochthonous population had been reduced from seven thousand to less than two hundred in the course of the thirty-two years that the British colony at Risdon had been in existence. The original settlers, a group of convicts under the supervision of Lieutenant John Bowen, had hunted the native Tasmanians as they would have hunted wolves or rats or any other creatures that competed for space and food. George Robertson had come to save them.

Picture him: thirty, eyes like rinse water, hair bleached white in the sun, the tender glossy skin showing through the molt of nose and cheekbone. A gangling tall man who walked with a limp and carried an umbrella everywhere he went. He was an Anglican clergyman. His superiors had sent him to the island on a mission of mercy: to save the aboriginal Tasmanians from extinction and perdition both. Robertson had leaped at the opportunity. He would be a paraclete, a leader, an arm of God. But when he stepped ashore at Risdon, he found that no one had seen a native Tasmanian — alive or dead — in nearly five years. Like the thylacines and wombats, they had withdrawn to the desolate slopes of the interior.

The one exception was a native woman called Trucanini who had been captured five years earlier and integrated into colonial life as a servant to the governor. When John Bowen had organized a line of beaters to sweep the bush and exterminate the remaining “black crows,” the drive had turned up only two Tasmanians — Trucanini and her mother, who were discovered sleeping beneath a log. The others had vanished. Trucanini’s mother was an old woman, blind and naked, her skin ropy and cracked. Bowen left her to die.

The day he landed, Robertson limped up to the back door of the governor’s manor house, umbrella tucked under his arm, stepped into the kitchen and led Trucanini out into the courtyard. She was in her early forties, toothless, her nose splayed, cheeks and forehead whorled with tattoos. Robertson embraced her, forced her to her knees in the sand and taught her to pray. A week later the two of them struck off into the bush, unarmed, in search of the remnants of her tribe.

It took him four years. The governor had declared him legally dead, his mother back in Melbourne had been notified, a marker had been placed in the cemetery. Then one afternoon, in the teeth of a slashing monsoon, Robertson strode up the governor’s teakwood steps followed by one hundred eighty-seven hungry aboriginal Christians. Wooden crosses dangled from their necks, their heads were bowed, palms laid together in prayer. The rains washed over them like a succession of waterfalls. Robertson asked for safe conduct to Flinders Island; the governor granted it.

The Tasmanians were a Stone Age society. They wore no clothes, lived in the open, foraged for food. Robertson clothed them, built huts and lean-tos, taught them to use flint, cultivate gardens, bury their excrement. He taught them to pray, and he taught them to abandon polygamy for the sacrament of marriage. They were shy, tractable people, awed and bewildered by their white redeemer, and they did their best to please him. There was one problem, however. They died like mayflies. By 1847 there were less than forty of them left. Twelve years later there were two: Trucanini, now long past menopause, and her fifth husband, William Lanne.

Robertson stuck it out, though he and Trucanini moved back into Risdon when William Lanne went off on a six-month whaling voyage. There they waited for Lanne’s return, and Robertson prayed for the impossible — that Trucanini would bear a child. But then he realized that she would have to bear at least one other and then that the children would have to live in incest if the race were to survive. He no longer knew what to pray for.

When Lanne’s ship dropped anchor, Robertson was waiting. He took the wizened little tattooed man by the elbow and walked him to Trucanini’s hut, then waited at a discreet distance. After an hour he went home to bed. In the morning Lanne was found outside the supply store, a casket of rum and a tin cup between his legs. His head was cocked back, and his mouth, which hung open, was a cauldron of flies.

Seven years later Trucanini died in bed. And George Robertson gave up the cloth.

Concerning the higher primates: there are now on earth circa 25,000 chimpanzees, 5,000 gorillas, 3,000 orangutans, and 4,000,000,000 men.

Didus ineptus, the dodo. A flightless pigeon the size of a turkey, extinct 1648. All that remains of it today is a foot in the British museum, a head in Copenhagen, and a quantity of dust.

Suns fade, and planets wither. Solar systems collapse. When the sun reaches its red-giant stage in five billion years it will flare up to sear the earth, ignite it like a torch held to a scrap of newsprint, the seas evaporated, the forests turned to ash, the ragged Himalayan peaks fused and then converted to dust, cosmic dust. What’s a species here, a species there? This is where extinction becomes sublime.

Listen: when my father died I did not attend the funeral. Three years later I flew in to visit with my mother. We drank vodka gimlets, and I was suddenly seized with a desire to visit my father’s grave. It was 10 P.M., December, snow fast to the frozen earth. I asked her which cemetery. She thought I was joking.

I drove as far as the heavy-link chain across the main gate, then stepped out of the car into a fine granular snow. My fingers slipped the switch of the flashlight through woolen gloves and I started for section 220F. The ground stretched off, leprous white, broken by the black scars of the monuments. It took nearly an hour to find, the granite markers alike as pebbles on a beach, names and dates, names and dates. I trailed down 220F, the light playing off stone and statue. Then I found it. My father’s name in a spot of light. I regarded the name: a three-part name, identical to my own. The light held, snowflakes creeping through the beam like motes of dust. I extinguished the light.

(1977)

THE FOG MAN

He came twice a week, rattling through the development in an army-surplus jeep, laying down a roiling smoke screen that melted the trees into oblivion, flattened hills and swallowed up houses, erased Fords, Chevies and Studebakers as if they were as insubstantial as the air itself, and otherwise transformed the world to our satisfaction. Shrubs became dinosaurs, lampposts giraffes, the blacktop of the streets seethed like the surface of the swamp primeval. Our fathers stood there on their emerald lawns, hoses dripping, and they waved languidly or turned their backs to shoot a sparkling burst at the flower beds or forsythias. We took to our bikes, supercharged with the excitement of it, and we ran just behind him, the fog man, wheeling in and out of the tight billowing clouds like fighter pilots slashing across the sky or Grand Prix racers nosing in for the lead on that final excruciating lap. He gave us nothing except those moments of transfiguration, but we chased him as single-mindedly as we chased the ice-cream man in his tinkling white truck full of Drumsticks and Eskimo Pies, chased him till he’d completed his tour of the six connecting streets of the development — up one side and down the other — and lurched across the highway, trailing smoke, for the next.

And then the smoke settled, clinging to the dewy wet grass, the odor of smoldering briquettes fought over the top of the sweet narcotic smell of it, and we were gone, disseminated, slammed behind identical screen doors, in our identical houses, for the comfort and magic of the TV. My father was there, always there, propped up in his recliner, one hand over his eyes to mask an imaginary glare, the other clutched round his sweating drink. My mother was there too, legs tucked under her on the couch, the newspaper spread in her lap, her drink on the cluttered table beside her.

“The fog man was just here,” I would announce. I didn’t expect a response, really — it was just something to say. The show on TV was about a smiling family. All the shows were about smiling families. My mother would nod.

One night I appended a question. “He’s spraying for bugs, right?” This much I knew, this much had been explained to me, but I wanted confirmation, affirmation, I wanted reason and meaning to illuminate my life.

My father said nothing. My mother looked up. “Mosquitoes.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought — but how come there’s so many of them then? They bit right through my shirt on the front porch.”

My mother tapped at her cigarette, took a sip of her drink. “You can’t get them all,” she said.

It was at about this time that the local power company opened the world’s first atomic power plant at Indian Point. Ten years earlier nuclear fission had been an instrument of war and destruction; now it was safe, manageable; now it would warm our houses and light our lights and power our hi-fis and toasters and dishwashers. The electric company took pains to ensure that the community saw it that way. It was called public relations.

I didn’t know the term then. I was eleven years old, in my first week of my last year of elementary school, and on my way to the power plant in a school bus crammed to the yawning windows with my excitable classmates. This was known as a field trip. The previous year we’d been to a farm in Brewster and the Museum of Natural History in New York. We were starting early this year, but it was all due to the fact of this astonishing new technological force set down amongst us, this revolution in the production of electricity and the streamlining of our lives. We didn’t know what to expect.

The bus rumbled and belched fumes. I sat on the hard cracked leatherette seat beside Casper Mendelson and watched the great gray concrete dome rise up out of the clutch of the trees, dominating the point and the placid broad fish-stinking river beyond it. It was impressive, this huge structure inside of which the titanic forces of the universe were pared down to size. Casper said that it could blow up, like the bomb they’d dropped on the Japanese, and that it would take all of Peterskill and Westchester with it. The river would turn to steam and there’d be nothing left but a crater the size of the Grand Canyon and we’d all be melted in our beds. I gaped out the window at the thing, awestruck, the big dome keeping a lid on all that seething complexity, and I was impressed, but I couldn’t help thinking of the point’s previous incarnation as an amusement park, a place of strung lights, cotton candy and carousels. Now there was this gray dome.

They led us into a little brightly lit building full of colorful exhibits, where we handled things that were meant to be handled, scuffed the gleaming linoleum floors and watched an animated short in which Johnny Atom splits himself in two and saves the world by creating electricity. The whole thing was pretty dull, aside from the dome itself and what Casper had said about it, and within the hour my classmates were filling the place with the roar of a stampede, breaking the handles off things, sobbing, skipping, playing tag and wondering seriously about lunch — which, as it turned out, we were to have back at school, in the cafeteria, after which we were expected to return to our classrooms and discuss what we’d learned on our field trip.

I remember the day for the impression that imposing gray dome made on me, but also because it was the first chance I got to have a look at Maki Duryea, the new girl who’d been assigned to the other sixth-grade section. Maki was black — or not simply black, but black and Oriental both. Her father had been stationed in Osaka during the occupation; her mother was Japanese. I watched her surreptitiously that morning as I sat in the rear of the bus with Casper. She was somewhere in the middle, sitting beside Donna Siprelle, a girl I’d known all my life. All I could make out was the back of her head, but that was enough, that alone was a revelation. Her hair was an absolute, unalloyed, interstellar black, and it disappeared behind the jutting high ridge of the seat back as if it might go on forever. It had hung iron straight when we first climbed aboard the bus that morning, but on the way back it was transformed, a leaping electric snarl that engulfed the seat and eclipsed the neat little ball of yellow curls that clung to the back of Donna Siprelle’s head. “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea,” Casper began to chant, though no one could hear him but me in the pandemonium of that preprandial school bus. Annoyed, I poked him with a savage elbow but he kept it up, louder now, to spite me.

There were no blacks in our school, there were no Asians or Hispanics. Italians, Poles, Jews, Irish, the descendants of the valley’s Dutch and English settlers, these we had, these we were, but Maki Duryea was the first black — and the first Asian. Casper’s father was Jewish, his mother a Polish Catholic. Casper had the soaring IQ of a genius, but he was odd, skewed in some deep essential way that set him apart from the rest of us. He was the first to masturbate, the first to drink and smoke, though he cared for neither. He caused a panic throughout the school when he turned up missing one day after lunch and was found, after a room-by-room, locker-by-locker search, calmly reading on the fire escape; he burst from his chair at the back of the classroom once and did fifty frantic squat-thrusts in front of the hapless teacher and then blew on his thumb till he passed out. He was my best friend.

He turned to me then, on the bus, and broke off his chant. His eyes were the color of the big concrete dome, his head was shaved to a transparent stubble. “She stinks,” he said, grinning wildly, his eyes leaping at my own. “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea”—he took up the chant again before subsiding into giggles. “They don’t smell like we do.”

My family was Irish. Irish, that’s all I knew. A shirt was cotton or it was wool. We were Irish. No one talked about it, there was no exotic language spoken in the house, no ethnic dress or cuisine, we didn’t go to church. There was only my grandfather.

He came that year for Thanksgiving, a short big-bellied man with close-cropped white hair and glancing white eyebrows and a trace of something in his speech I hadn’t heard before — or if I had it was in some old out-of-focus movie dredged up for the TV screen, nothing I would have remembered. My grandmother came too. She was spindly, emaciated, her skin blistered with shingles, a diabetic who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, but there was joy in her and it was infectious. My father, her son, woke up. A festive air took hold of the house.

My grandfather, who years later dressed in a suit for my father’s funeral and was mistaken for a banker, had had a heart attack and he wasn’t drinking. Or rather, he was strictly enjoined from drinking, and my parents, who drank themselves, drank a lot, drank too much, took pains to secrete the liquor supply. Every bottle was removed from the cabinet, even the odd things that hadn’t been touched in years — except by me, when I furtively unscrewed the cap of this or that and took a sniff or touched my tongue tentatively to the cold hard glass aperture — and the beer disappeared from the refrigerator. I didn’t know what the big deal was. Liquor was there, a fact of life, it was unpleasant and adults indulged in it as they indulged in any number of bizarre and unsatisfactory practices. I kicked a football around the rock-hard frozen lawn.

And then one afternoon — it was a day or two before Thanksgiving and my grandparents had been with us a week — I came in off the front lawn, my fingers numb and nose running, and the house was in an uproar. A chair was overturned in the corner, the coffee table was slowly listing over a crippled leg and my grandmother was on the floor, frail, bunched, a bundle of sticks dropped there in a windstorm. My grandfather stood over her, red-faced and raging, while my mother snatched at his elbow like a woman tumbling over the edge of a cliff. My father wasn’t home from work yet. I stood there in the doorway, numb from the embrace of the wind, and heard the inarticulate cries of those two women against the oddly inflected roars of that man, and I backed out the door and pulled it closed behind me.

The next day my grandfather, sixty-eight years old and stiff in the knees, walked two miles in twenty-degree weather to Peterskill, to the nearest liquor store. It was dark, suppertime, and we didn’t know where he was. “He just went out for a walk,” my mother said. Then the phone rang. It was the neighbor two doors down. There was a man passed out in her front yard — somebody said we knew him. Did we?

I spent the next two days — Thanksgiving and the day after — camping in the sorry patch of woods at the end of the development. I wasn’t running away, nothing as decisive or extreme as that — I was just camping, that was all. I gnawed cold turkey up there in the woods, lifted congealed stuffing to my mouth with deadened fingers. In the night I lay shivering in my blankets, never colder before or since.

We were Irish. I was Irish.

That winter, like all winters in those days, was interminable, locked up in the grip of frozen slush and exhaust-blackened snow. The dead dark hours of school were penance for some crime we hadn’t yet committed. The TV went on at three-thirty when we got home from school, and it was still on when we went to bed at nine. I played basketball that winter in a league organized by some of the fathers in the development, and three times a week I walked home from the fungus-infested gym with a crust of frozen sweat in my hair. I grew an inch and a half, I let my crewcut grow out and I began to turn up the collar of my ski jacket. I spent most of my time with Casper, but in spite of him, as the pale abbreviated days wore on, I found myself growing more and more at ease with the idea of Maki Duryea.

She was still foreign, still exotic, still the new kid and worse, much worse, the whole business complicated by the matter of her skin color and her hair and the black unblinking depths of her eyes, but she was there just like the rest of us and after a while it seemed as if she’d always been there. She was in the other section, but I saw her on the playground, in the hallway, saw her waiting on line in the cafeteria with a tray in her hands or struggling up the steps of the school bus in a knit hat and mittens no different from what the other girls wore. I didn’t have much to say to any of the girls really, but I suppose I must have said things to her in passing, and once, coming off the playground late, I found myself wedged up against her on the crowded school bus. And then there was the time the dancing teacher, with a casual flick of her wrist, paired me off with her.

Everything about dancing was excruciating. It was not kickball, it was not basketball or bombardment. The potential for embarrassment was incalculable. We were restless and bored, the gymnasium was overheated against the sleet that rattled at the windows, and the girls, entranced, wore peculiar little smiles as Mrs. Feldman demonstrated the steps. The boys slouched against one adamantine wall, poking one another, shuffling their feet and playing out an elaborate ritual to demonstrate that none of this held the slightest interest for them, for us, though it did, and we were nervous about it despite ourselves. Alone, of all the two classes combined, Casper refused to participate. Mrs. Feldman sent him to the principal’s office without so much as a second glance, chose partners arbitrarily for the remainder of the class and started up the ancient phonograph and the arcane scratchy records of songs no one knew and rhythms no one could follow, and before I was fully cognizant of what was happening I found myself clutching Maki Duryea’s damp palm in my own while my arm lay like a dead thing across the small of her back. She was wearing a sweater thick enough for Arctic exploration and she was sweating in the choking humid jungle atmosphere of the gymnasium. I could smell her, but despite what Casper had said the heat of her body gave off a luxurious yeasty soporific odor that held me spellbound and upright through the droning eternity of the record.

The dance, the big dance that all this terpsichorean instruction was leading up to, was held on February 29, and Mrs. Feldman, in an evil twist of fate, decided to honor custom and have the girls invite the boys as their partners. We did perspective drawing in art class — great lopsided vistas of buildings and avenues dwindling in the distance — while the girls made up the invitations with strips of ribbon, construction paper and paste. My mind was on basketball, ice fishing, the distant trembling vision of spring and summer and liberation from Mrs. Feldman, the gym and the cafeteria and all the rest, and I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, when Maki’s invitation arrived. I didn’t want to go. My mother insisted. My father said nothing.

And then the telephone began to ring. My mother answered each call with quiet determination, immovable, unshakable, whispering into the phone, doodling on a pad, lifting the drink or a cigarette to her lips. I don’t know what she said exactly, but she was talking to the other mothers, the mothers of sons who hadn’t been invited to the dance by Maki Duryea, and she was explaining to them precisely how and why she could and would allow her son to go to the dance with a Negro. In later years, as the civil-rights movement arose and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King fell and the ghettoes burned, she never had much to say about it, but I could feel her passion then, on the telephone, in the cool insistent rasp of her voice.

I went to the dance with Maki Duryea. She wore a stiff organdy dress with short sleeves that left her looking awkward and underdressed and I wore a tie and sportcoat and arranged my hair for the occasion. I held her and I danced with her, though I didn’t want to, though I snapped at her when she asked if I wanted a brownie and a cup of punch, though I looked with envy and longing to the streamer-draped corner where Casper alternately leered at me and punched Billy Bartro in the shoulder; I danced with her, but that was it, that was as far as I could go, and I didn’t care if the snow was black and the dome blew off the reactor and Johnny Atom came and melted us all in our sleep.

It was a late spring and we tried to force it by inaugurating baseball season while the snow still lingered atop the dead yellow grass and the frozen dirt beneath it. We dug out balls and mitts and stood in the street in T-shirts, gooseflesh on our arms, shoulders quaking, a nimbus of crystallized breath suspended over our heads. Casper didn’t play ball — foot, hand, base or basket — and he stood hunched in his jacket, palming a cigarette and watching us out of his mocking gray eyes. I caught cold and then flu and stayed in bed a week. On the first of April I went trout fishing, a ritual of spring, but the day was gloomy and lowering, with a stiff wind and temperatures in the twenties. I cast a baited hook till my arm lost all sensation. The trout might as well have been extinct.

Since the time of the dance I’d had nothing to do with Maki Duryea. I wouldn’t even look at her. If she’d suddenly exploded in flames on the playground or swelled up to the size of a dirigible I wouldn’t have known. I’d taken a steady stream of abuse over the dance episode, and I was angry and embarrassed. For a full month afterward I was the object of an accelerated program of ear snapping and head knuckling, the target of spitballs and wads of lined notebook paper with crude hearts scrawled across their rumpled interiors, but we were innocent then, and no one used the epithets we would later learn, the language of hate and exclusion. They turned on me because I had taken Maki Duryea to the dance — or rather, because I had allowed her to take me — and because she was different and their parents disapproved in a way they couldn’t yet define. I resented her for it, and I resented my mother too.

And so, when the rumors first began to surface, I took a kind of guilty satisfaction in them. There had been trouble at Maki’s house. Vandals — and the very term gave me a perverse thrill — vandals had spray-painted racial slurs on the glistening black surface of their macadam driveway. My mother was incensed. She took her drink and her cigarettes and huddled over the phone. She even formed a committee of two with Casper’s mother (who was one of the few who hadn’t phoned over the dance invitation), and they met a time or two in Casper’s living room to drink a clear liquid in high-stemmed glasses, tap their cigarettes over ashtrays and lament the sad state of the community, the development, the town, the country, the world itself.

While our mothers were wringing their hands and buzzing at one another in their rasping secretive voices, Casper took me aside and showed me a copy of the local newspaper, flung on the lawn not five minutes earlier by Morty Solomon as he weaved up the street on his bicycle. I didn’t read newspapers. I didn’t read books. I didn’t read anything. Casper forced it into my hands and there it was, the rumor made concrete: VANDALS STRIKE AGAIN. This time, a cross had been burned on the Duryea lawn. I looked up at Casper in amazement. I wanted to ask him what that meant, a cross — a cross was religious, wasn’t it, and this didn’t have anything to do with religion, did it? — but I felt insecure in my confusion and I held back.

“You know what we ought to do?” he said, watching me closely.

I was thinking of Maki Duryea, of her hair and her placid eyes, thinking of the leaping flames and the spray paint in the driveway. “What?”

“We ought to egg them.”

“But—” I was going to ask how we could egg them if we didn’t know who did it, but then I caught the startling perverse drift of what he was suggesting and in my astonishment I blurted, “But why?”

He shrugged, ducked his head, scuffed a foot on the carpet. We were in the hallway, by the telephone stand. I heard my mother’s voice from the room beyond, though the door was closed and she was talking in a whisper. The voice of Casper’s mother came right back at her in raspy collusion. Casper just stared at the closed door as if to say, There, there’s your answer.

After a moment he said, “What’s the matter — you afraid?”

I was twelve now, twelve and a half. How could anyone at that age admit to fear? “No,” I said. “I’m not afraid.”

The Duryea house lay outside the confines of the development. It was a rental house, two stories over a double garage in need of paint and shingles, and it sat on a steep rutted dirt road half a mile away. There were no streetlights along that unfinished road and the trees overhung it so that the deepest shadows grew deeper still beneath them. It was a warm, slick, humid night at the end of May, the sort of night that surprises you with its richness and intensity, smells heightened, sounds muffled, lights blurred to indistinction. When we left Casper’s it was drizzling.

Casper bought the eggs, two dozen, at the corner store out on the highway. His parents were rich — rich compared to mine, at any rate — and he always seemed to have money. The storekeeper was a tragic-looking man with purple rings of puffed flesh beneath his eyes and a spill of gut that was like an avalanche under the smeared white front of his apron. Casper slipped two cigars into his pocket while I distracted the man with a question about the chocolate milk — did it come in a smaller size?

As we started up the dirt road, eggs in hand, Casper was strangely silent. When a dog barked from the driveway of a darkened house he clutched my arm, and a moment later, when a car turned into the street, he pulled me into the bushes and crouched there, breathing hard, till the headlights faded away. “Maki Duryea,” he whispered, chanting it as he’d chanted it a hundred times before, “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea.” My heart was hammering. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t know why I was doing it, didn’t yet realize that the whole purpose of the exercise was to invert our parents’ values, trash them, grind them into the dirt, and that all ethical considerations were null in the face of that ancient imperative. I was a freedom fighter. The eggs were hand grenades. I clutched them to my chest.

We hid ourselves in the wild tangle of shrubs gone to seed outside the house and watched the steady pale lighted windows for movement. My hair hung limp with the drizzle. Casper squatted over his ankles and fingered his box of eggs. I could barely make him out. At one point a figure passed in front of the window — I saw the hair, the mat of it, the sheen — and it might have been Maki, but I wasn’t sure. It could have been her mother. Or her sister or aunt or grandmother — it could have been anybody. Finally, when I was as tired of crouching there in the bushes as I’ve ever been tired of being anywhere, even the dentist’s, the lights flicked off. Or no, they didn’t just flick off — they exploded in darkness and the black torrent of the night rushed in to engulf the house.

Casper rose to his feet. I heard him fumbling with his cardboard carton of eggs. We didn’t speak — speech would have been superfluous. I rose too. My eggs, palpable, smooth, fit the palm of my hand as if they’d been designed for it. I raised my arm — baseball, football, basketball — and Casper stirred beside me. The familiar motion, the rush of air: I will never forget the sound of that first egg loosing itself against the front of the house, a wetness there, a softness, the birth of something. No weapon, but a weapon all the same.

The summer sustained me. Hot, unfettered, endless. On the first day of vacation I perched in an apple tree at the end of the cul-de-sac that bordered the development and contemplated the expanse of time and pleasure before me, and then it was fall and I was in junior high. Maki Duryea had moved. I’d heard as much from Casper, and one afternoon, at the end of summer, I hiked up that long rutted dirt road to investigate. The house stood empty. I climbed the ridge behind it to peer in through the naked windows and make sure. Bare floors stretched to bare walls.

And then, in the confusion of the big parking lot at the junior high where fifty buses deposited the graduates of a dozen elementary schools, where I felt lost and out of place and shackled in a plaid long-sleeved shirt new that morning from the plastic wrapping, I saw her. She sprang down from another bus in a cascade of churning legs and arms and anxious faces, a bookbag slung over one shoulder, hair ironed to her waist. I couldn’t move. She looked up then and saw me and she smiled. Then she was gone.

That night, as I slapped a hard black ball against the side of the house, thinking nothing, I caught a faint electrifying whiff of a forgotten scent on the air, and there he was, the fog man, rattling by the house in his open jeep. My bike lay waiting at the curb and my first impulse was to leap for it, but I held off. There was something different here, something I couldn’t quite place at first. And then I saw what it was: the fog man was wearing a mask, a gas mask, the sort of thing you saw in war movies. He’d collected the usual escort of knee-pumping neighborhood kids by the time he’d made his second pass down the street in front of our house, and I’d moved to the curb now to study this phenomenon, this subtle alteration in the texture of things. He looked different in the mask, sinister somehow, and his eyes seemed to glitter.

The fog obliterated the houses across from me, the wheeling children vanished, the low black roiling clouds melted toward me across the perfect sweep of the lawn. And then, before I knew what I was doing, I was on my bike with the rest of them, chasing the fog man through the mist, chasing him as if my life depended on it.

(1989)

DROWNING

In this story, someone will drown. Yet there will be no apparent reason for this drowning — it will not for example be attributable to suicide, murder, divine retribution — nor even such arcana as current and undertow. It will instead be like so many events of the future: inexplicable, incomprehensible. Nonetheless, it will occur.

There is a girl alone on the beach, a mere inkspot in the white: nothing really, when compared with the massive dunes that loom behind her and the sea, dark and implacable, which stretches before her to Europe and Africa. She is lying there on her back, eyes closed, her body loose, toes pointing straight out to the water. Her skin glistens with oil, tanned deep as a ripe pear. And she wears a white bikini: two strips of cloth as dazzingly white in this sun as the sand itself. She is after an effect, a contrast.

Now she sits up, the taut line of her abdomen bunching in soft creases, and glances slyly around. No one in sight up and down the beach, for miles perhaps — the only sign of life the gull beating overhead, muttering in its prehistoric voice. Her hands reach behind for the strings to the bikini halter — the elbows strain out in sharp triangles and her back arches, throwing her chest forward. She feels a quick pulse of excitement as her breasts fall free and the sea breeze tickles against them. She’s brown here too — a shade lighter than her shoulders and abdomen, but still tanned deeply.

She falls back on her elbows, face to the sun, the hair soft down her back and into the sand. The gull is gone now, and the only sounds are the hiss of the foam and the plangent thunder of the breakers smoothing rock a hundred yards out. She steals another look round — a good long one, over her shoulders and up to the peaks of the dunes. No one. “Why not?” she thinks. “Why not?” And her thumbs ease into the elastic band that girds her hips, working it down, kicking her legs free of it, stretching and spreading herself to the sun. But here she is white, ridiculously white, white as the bikini, white as the breakers.

Then she lets her head fall back again, closes her eyes, points her toes. But she can’t hold it for long — she feels something, a racing inside that makes her breath quick — and she raises her head to look long down her body: the breasts high on her chest, the sharp declivity of the rib cage, the smooth abdomen, the tightly wound hairs. The sun on her body is languid, warm: a massage. At her side: the tanning oil, cooking in the sun. She uncaps the plastic bottle, squeezes, feels the hot spurt of it across her chest. Then her palms are smoothing over the skin in a slow circular motion and she remembers how they’d all studied her with their hot faces while she sat above them, a Greek statue, staring out the window. From their expressions she could tell it wasn’t like sketching a professional model — they’d seen her around campus so many times and so many times had looked up her skirt and down her blouse, undressing her with their eyes. And then suddenly, a shock: there she was. She thinks of those faces, those nervous hands, hairy wrists. And laughs, laughs while her fingers move in the ripening sun — smoothly, thrillingly — over her body.

Five hundred yards down the beach, the man ends his hike and approaches the water’s edge. He kicks about in the sand while the soft foaming fringe shoots over his toes, up to his ankles and on past to retrace a broad ellipse in the sand behind him. He seems satisfied with the spot. Everything pleasantly symmetrical: the dark line of the high tide, the rounded peaks of the dunes, the fanned circular waves riding it on an infinity of waves, each identical to the first. Yes, he is satisfied, and like any other bather he wades in, the water rising gradually up his thin pale legs. But he is an anomaly here — his skin shows no trace of a tan — not the smallest freckle. Is this then his first day on the beach? He looks unhealthy and thin, too white in this flashing sun.

He wades deeper and the water washes level with his groin, the roll of the waves gently floating his genitals. The sensation, after the first shock, is cool and smooth, like the breath of an air conditioner. Is he aware, as he turns his head to look down the beach, that the girl, drowsing now despite herself, is naked and alone — defenseless even? I think not. There is certainly something down there in the distance, obscured by the glare and heat haze. Something dark, a stain in the whiteness. But really, it’s none of his concern. The waves lap at his underarms, splash up into his beard — and then he dives smooth into the next tall one, spearing through like a dolphin. He kicks powerfully and speeds through the incoming peaks until he is a considerable distance from shore. From his performance in the water, it is apparent that this is his element, that the paleness he displayed on the beach has no bearing here. Far from shore, his head is a buoy, tentatively riding up on the distant blinding whitecaps.

She strolled into the classroom in a short white smock. The hem of the smock defined a sharp line across the rise of her buttocks. It lifted and fell with each deliberate step. The art students, the ones who’d absently sketched a dozen models before her, now practically leaped from their chairs. She recognized nearly all of them from around campus, had ignored their slick hungry looks on countless occasions. She knew the girls too — they colored a bit when she entered, shifted in their seats from buttock to buttock. A few glared. But she just strolled, calmly, confidently, her chest thrust forward, just strolled right to the center of the room, yawned a brief yawn and then unbuttoned the smock, and let it fall to the floor.

In the broad expanse of the dunes a pair of wide feet wanders, kicking channels in the hot sand, becoming buried and unburied alternately as they are lifted from one spot to the next. Bobbing along, just ahead of the shuffling feet, is a circular shadow. Its unwitting creator is an obese young man, dressed in T-shirt and bathing trunks — the baggy boxer type with a broad red stripe on each side. Clenched in his left hand is a towel. Every few moments the towel rises to his face and flaps about in an effort to mop up the perspiration. Brackish creeks and streams and rivulets wash over the globe of his torso and down his legs to dot the sand. He apparently has come a good distance, but why through the harsh dunes? If, as I suspect, he is looking for a secluded stretch of sea for bathing, why doesn’t he walk along the beach, where temperatures are cooler and footing easier?

He approaches the crest of the final dune blocking his way to the beach, the sea breeze stiff in his nostrils and cool against his face. Feet splayed, his legs attack the slope — the band of ocean visible over the lip of the dune grows wider, opening like an eye, with each plodding step upward. Finally, with a great wet heave of breath, he reaches the summit. Ah! The wind in his hair, the sea, the lone gull coasting overhead, solitude! But no, there below him is … a female! Nude and asleep! He starts back, vanishes. And then, on his belly in the sand, takes a lingering look. Her breasts, flattened with gravity, nipples pointing heavenward, her black-haired pubes! Beneath him, another part of the body, just a small appendage, adds itself to the general tumescence.

One hour. They had one hour to leer to their hearts’ content — she wasn’t even watching — her gaze was fixed on the bell tower out the window and across the campus. They were crowding in, faces blank, scholars. Scholars operating under the premise that she was just a specimen, headless and mindless, a physique, a painted beetle fixed beneath a microscope.

She knew better.

Tomorrow they wouldn’t dare approach her, yet they’d stare even harder, straining to see up her skirt and down her blouse, grinning like jackals. They’d leer and joke as if she were some kind of freak. And she would be distant, haughty. They’d had their hour, and that was that. The closest any of them would ever come to her. In bed in the dark they would fitfully strain to summon her image, but like all mental pictures it would come in flashes, a film out of frame. She knew all this, and as she posed that day the faintest trace of a smile rounded her lips: inscrutably.

All his life he’d been forced to contend with sniggers, grinning faces, pointed fingers. People looked on him as a bad joke — a caricature of themselves, some sort of cosmic admonition to keep their noses clean. They laughed to cover their horror, laughed, imagining their own eyes pinched behind those sagging cheeks and chins. And often as not they resorted to violent pranks. He had for instance been obliged to discontinue regular attendance at the high school when he found he couldn’t walk the halls without having his head slapped from behind by some invisible hand or having the books pushed from his arms to spray beneath hundreds of trampling feet. On one occasion eight or nine lean toughs had lined the wall outside his chemistry class, and when he emerged had enthusiastically decorated his physiognomy with lemon chiffon, coconut custard and Boston cream. After that, his parents decided that perhaps home tutoring would be more viable.

Since the time of these experiences he had very rarely entertained the company of others, had very rarely in fact left his parents’ home. In the winter it was the apartment, in the summer the beach house. His social phobia was so overwhelming that he refused to show himself in public under any circumstance, not even in so trivial a role as picking up half a pound of pastrami at the delicatessen around the corner or taking the wash to the laundromat. He was a hermit, a monk, a solipsist. In the summer he would walk for miles through the dunes so he could swim alone without fear of exposing himself to ridicule, the preponderance of his flesh displayed in a swimsuit.

The upshot of all this is that he had, at the time of this story, reached the age of twenty-one years without ever having been laid. He had never been on a date, had never brushed a cheek against his own, had never squeezed a sweating palm or tit.

He stands, decides to have a closer look. But what if she should wake? The thought attenuates his resolve and he freezes there at the dune’s crest, staring, obsessed. Just like in the nudist magazines. Masturbatory fantasies recur, charge through his head like rams — this is just the situation he had always pictured alone in his room, pulling furiously at his pud.

Soon he becomes increasingly conscious of the heat and removes his T-shirt, dropping it carelessly beside him, his attention fixed on the browned peaks below. He starts stealthily down the slope: a sly beast stalking its prey. But in a moment he’s sliding down out of control, a truckload of sand following him. The seat of his trunks fills with it. At the base of the dune he recovers himself, jumps up, afraid to breathe, his rear abraded and an uncomfortable projection straining against the zipper of his trunks. The trunks begin to annoy him: he removes them.

A course of action is not entirely clear to him, but he moves closer anyhow, now as naked as she. The breasts swell gently with her sleep, the legs stir, the tongue peeps out to moisten her lips. And then suddenly the feathery warmth of the sun becomes a hot oppressive burden and she wakes to a huge childish face in her own and an insistent poking between her thighs. She shrieks, pushes wildly at that fat face. But she’s pinned beneath a truck, she’s been involved in an accident, that’s it, a mountain has fallen and she’s trapped beneath it. (Sure he’s embarrassed but how can he stop now, the blood swelling up in him as it is?)

Cheeks clawed and gashed, eardrums aching, sweating like a frosted goblet, he drives relentlessly on. He inserts a massive fist in her mouth to quiet the wailing, and inadvertently, as he stiffens toward his moment of truth, he shoves increasingly harder, her head smoothing a depression in the sand — a basin for the blood that seeps from her mashed lips, loosened teeth. She gasps, croaks for air. Below, the white triangle is smothered beneath a sea of convulsively heaving flesh, and furtively, deep within, it too begins to bleed.

“Hey!” yell the fishermen. (They’d been poking around up the shore, drinking beer from a cooler, hunting in a half-assed way for stripers or porgies or blues.) “Hey!” And then they begin running toward what looks like a giant sea turtle digging frantically to bury its eggs.

His head rears up in surprise. With a grunt he disengages himself from her body and his fist from her mouth. An enamel cap, embedded between the second and third knuckles of his left hand, comes with it. He stands there for a blind moment, naked, dripping blood, caught in the act of committing an atrocity. He feels shame, mortification, guilt, remorse, self-denigration — and a rabid animal impulse to escape at any cost. He lumbers in a panic toward the sea, his only possible refuge. The fishermen reach the girl just as he is parting the waves, a colossal preterrestrial creature more at home in the sea than on land. “Hey!” the fishermen shout. But he is gone, paddling furiously, smashing the waves like an icebreaker. Deeper and deeper, farther and farther from his pursuers and his own fat life.

The fishermen are standing in the surf, their shoes and pants wet. They bellow a few drunken imprecations but he is already too distant to care. He drifts off on the waves, a great lump of sperm seeking to impregnate the sea. The fishermen turn back to the whimpering girl. One gently cups his hand under her chin while the other removes his trousers and sets to her.

Far out to sea, far beyond the churning fat boy and the rapacious fishermen, that strange pale creature floats, peacefully drowsing. His beard and long hair fan out in the water, become masses of seaweed. A chance wave, peaking higher than the others, rolls over him and he swallows a quantity of water. The next buries him. He has had no warning, no chance to cry for help, no hope that help would be available. Quite simply then, he drowns. A random event, one that I imagine, considering the world as a whole, is quite common.

The fat boy creeps home naked through the dark dunes, miles from where he had first encountered the girl. His feet and lower legs are lacerated from the stiff dune grass which bites into each blind step. In all, he feels a vague sense of shame, but also a certain exhilaration. After all, he’s finally made the first palpable step in overcoming his social inadequacy.

The fishermen are at home, watching color TV. They feel a deep and abiding sense of accomplishment, of fulfillment — though they returned home this afternoon with an empty porgy basket.

The girl sleeps a heavy drugged sleep, enfolded in the astringently white hospital sheets. Her tan contrasts nicely with them. The breath passes gently through her parted lips, lips battered and brown with dried blood. A gray-haired man (her father?) sits beside her, patting her sleeping hand.

The thin man, the pale one, is jerked spasmodically by the underwater currents, tangled in a bed of weed. The crabs have long since discovered him and are rattling their ancient horny shells about his flesh, delighted with the unexpected treat. The tide is washing in, and the drowned man with it. Eventually, I suspect, what is left of him will come to rest on the beach, a few yards away from a curious red-brown stain in the bleached sand. The half-cleaned skeletons and carapaces of other strange creatures lie there too, waiting for the morning’s

RARA AVIS

It looked like a woman or a girl perched there on the roof of the furniture store, wings folded like a shawl, long legs naked and exposed beneath a skirt of jagged feathers the color of sepia. The sun was pale, poised at equinox. There was the slightest breeze. We stood there, thirty or forty of us, gaping up at the big motionless bird as if we expected it to talk, as if it weren’t a bird at all but a plastic replica with a speaker concealed in its mouth. Sidor’s Furniture, it would squawk, loveseats and three-piece sectionals.

I was twelve. I’d been banging a handball against the side of the store when a man in a Studebaker suddenly swerved into the parking lot, slammed on his brakes, and slid out of the driver’s seat as if mesmerized. His head was tilted back, and he was shading his eyes, squinting to focus on something at the level of the roof. This was odd. Sidor’s roof — a flat glaring expanse of crushed stone and tar relieved only by the neon characters that irradiated the proprietor’s name — was no architectural wonder. What could be so captivating? I pocketed the handball and ambled round to the front of the store. Then I looked up.

There it was: stark and anomalous, a relic of a time before shopping centers, tract houses, gas stations and landfills, a thing of swamps and tidal flats, of ooze, fetid water, and rich black festering muck. In the context of the minutely ordered universe of suburbia, it was startling, as unexpected as a downed meteor or the carcass of a woolly mammoth. I shouted out, whooped with surprise and sudden joy.

Already people were gathering. Mrs. Novak, all three hundred pounds of her, was lumbering across the lot from her house on the corner, a look of bewilderment creasing her heavy jowls. Robbie Matechik wheeled up on his bike, a pair of girls emerged from the rear of the store with jump ropes, an old man in baggy trousers struggled with a bag of groceries. Two more cars pulled in, and a third stopped out on the highway. Hopper, Moe, Jennings, Davidson, Sebesta: the news echoed through the neighborhood as if relayed by tribal drums, and people dropped rakes, edgers, pruning shears, and came running. Michael Donadio, sixteen years old and a heartthrob at the local high school, was pumping gas at the station up the block. He left the nozzle in the customer’s tank, jumped the fence, and started across the blacktop, weaving under his pompadour. The customer followed him.

At its height, there must have been fifty people gathered there in front of Sidor’s, shading their eyes and gazing up expectantly, as if the bird were the opening act of a musical comedy or an ingenious new type of vending machine. The mood was jocular, festive even. Sidor appeared at the door of his shop with two stockboys, gazed up at the bird for a minute, and then clapped his hands twice, as if he were shooing pigeons. The bird remained motionless, cast in wax. Sidor, a fleshless old man with a monk’s tonsure and liver-spotted hands, shrugged his shoulders and mugged for the crowd. We all laughed. Then he ducked into the store and emerged with an end table, a lamp, a footstool, motioned to the stockboys, and had them haul out a sofa and an armchair. Finally he scrawled BIRD WATCHER’S SPECIAL on a strip of cardboard and taped it to the window. People laughed and shook their heads. “Hey, Sidor,” Albert Moe’s father shouted, “where’d you get that thing — the Bronx Zoo?”

I couldn’t keep still. I danced round the fringe of the crowd, tugging at sleeves and skirts, shouting out that I’d seen the bird first — which wasn’t strictly true, but I felt proprietary about this strange and wonderful creature, the cynosure of an otherwise pedestrian Saturday afternoon. Had I seen it in the air? people asked. Had it moved? I was tempted to lie, to tell them I’d spotted it over the school, the firehouse, the used-car lot, a hovering shadow, wings spread wider than the hood of a Cadillac, but I couldn’t. “No,” I said, quiet suddenly. I glanced up and saw my father in the back of the crowd, standing close to Mrs. Schlecta and whispering something in her ear. Her lips were wet. I didn’t know where my mother was. At the far end of the lot a girl in a college sweater was leaning against the fender of a convertible while her boyfriend pressed himself against her as if he wanted to dance.

Six weeks earlier, at night, the community had come together as it came together now, but there had been no sense of magic or festivity about the occasion. The Novaks, Donadios, Schlectas, and the rest — they gathered to watch an abandoned house go up in flames. I didn’t dance round the crowd that night. I stood beside my father, leaned against him, the acrid, unforgiving stink of the smoke almost drowned in the elemental odor of his sweat, the odor of armpit and crotch and secret hair, the sematic animal scent of him that had always repelled me — until that moment. Janine McCarty’s mother was shrieking. Ragged and torn, her voice clawed at the starless night, the leaping flames. On the front lawn, just as they backed the ambulance in and the crowd parted, I Caught a glimpse of Janine, lying there in the grass. Every face was shouting. The glare of the fire tore disordered lines across people’s eyes and dug furrows in their cheeks.

There was a noise to that fire, a killing noise, steady and implacable. The flames were like the waves at Coney Island — ghost waves, insubstantial, yellow and red rather than green, but waves all the same. They rolled across the foundation, spat from the windows, beat at the roof. Wayne Sanders was white-faced. He was a tough guy, two years older than I but held back in school because of mental sloth and recalcitrance. Police and firemen and wild-eyed neighborhood men nosed round him, excited, like hounds. Even then, in the grip of confusion and clashing voices, safe at my father’s side, I knew what they wanted to know. It was the same thing my father demanded of me whenever he caught me — in fact or by report — emerging from the deserted, vandalized, and crumbling house: What were you doing in there?

He couldn’t know.

Spires, parapets, derelict staircases, closets that opened on closets, the place was magnetic, vestige of an age before the neat rows of ranches and Cape Cods that lined both sides of the block. Plaster pulled back from the ceilings to reveal slats like ribs, glass pebbled the floors, the walls were paisleyed with aerosol obscenities. There were bats in the basement, rats and mice in the hallways. The house breathed death and freedom. I went there whenever I could. I heaved my interdicted knife end-over-end at the lintels and peeling cupboards, I lit cigarettes and hung them from my lower lip, I studied scraps of pornographic magazines with a fever beating through my body. Two days before the fire I was there with Wayne Sanders and Janine. They were holding hands. He had a switchblade, stiff and cold as an icicle. He gave me Ex-Lax and told me it was chocolate. Janine giggled. He shuffled a deck of battered playing cards and showed me one at a time the murky photos imprinted on them. My throat went dry with guilt.

After the fire I went to church. In the confessional the priest asked me if I practiced self-pollution. The words were formal, unfamiliar, but I knew what he meant. So, I thought, kneeling there in the dark, crushed with shame, there’s a name for it. I looked at the shadowy grille, looked toward the source of the soothing voice of absolution, the voice of forgiveness and hope, and I lied. “No,” I whispered.

And then there was the bird.

It never moved, not once, through all the commotion at its feet, through all the noise and confusion, all the speculation regarding its needs, condition, origin, species: it never moved. It was a statue, eyes unblinking, only the wind-rustled feathers giving it away for flesh and blood, for living bird. “It’s a crane,” somebody said. “No, no, it’s a herring — a blue herring.” Someone else thought it was an eagle. My father later confided that he believed it was a stork.

“Is it sick, do you think?” Mrs. Novak said.

“Maybe it’s broke its wing.”

“It’s a female,” someone insisted. “She’s getting ready to lay her eggs.”

I looked around and was surprised to see that the crowd had thinned considerably. The girl in the college sweater was gone, Michael Donadio was back across the street pumping gas, the man in the Studebaker had driven off. I scanned the crowd for my father: he’d gone home, I guessed. Mrs. Schlecta had disappeared too, and I could see the great bulk of Mrs. Novak receding into her house on the corner like a sea lion vanishing into a swell. After a while Sidor took his lamp and end table back into the store.

One of the older guys had a rake. He heaved it straight up like a javelin, as high as the roof of the store, and then watched it slam down on the pavement. The bird never flinched. People lit cigarettes, shuffled their feet. They began to drift off, one by one. When I looked around again there were only eight of us left, six kids and two men I didn’t recognize. The women and girls, more easily bored or perhaps less interested to begin with, had gone home to gas ranges and hopscotch squares: I could see a few of the girls in the distance, on the swings in front of the school, tiny, their skirts rippling like flags.

I waited. I wanted the bird to flap its wings, blink an eye, shift a foot; I wanted it desperately, wanted it more than anything I had ever wanted. Perched there at the lip of the roof, its feet clutching the drainpipe as if welded to it, the bird was a coil of possibility, a muscle relaxed against the moment of tension. Yes, it was magnificent, even in repose. And, yes, I could stare at it, examine its every line, from its knobbed knees to the cropped feathers at the back of its head, I could absorb it, become it, look out from its unblinking yellow eyes on the street grown quiet and the sun sinking behind the gas station. Yes, but that wasn’t enough. I had to see it in flight, had to see the great impossible wings beating in the air, had to see it transposed into its native element.

Suddenly the wind came up — a gust that raked at our hair and scattered refuse across the parking lot — and the bird’s feathers lifted like a petticoat. It was then that I understood. Secret, raw, red and wet, the wound flashed just above the juncture of the legs before the wind died and the feathers fell back in place.

I turned and looked past the neighborhood kids — my playmates — at the two men, the strangers. They were lean and seedy, unshaven, slouching behind the brims of their hats. One of them was chewing a toothpick. I caught their eyes: they’d seen it too.

I threw the first stone.

(1981)

THE OVERCOAT II

There was a commotion near the head of the queue, people shouting, elbowing one another, wedging themselves in, and bracing for the inevitable shock wave that would pulse through the line, tumbling children, pregnant women, and unsuspecting old pensioners like dominoes. Akaky craned his neck to see what was happening, but he already knew: they were running out of meat. Two and a half hours on line for a lump of gristly beef to flavor his kasha and cabbage, nearly a hundred people ahead of him and Lenin knows how many behind, and they had to go and run out.

It was no surprise. The same thing had happened three days ago, last week, last month, last year. A cynic might have been led to grumble, to disparage the farmers, the truckers, the butchers and butchers’ assistants, to question their mental capacity and cast aspersions on their ancestry. But not Akaky. No, he was as patient and enduring as the limes along the Boulevard Ring, and he knew how vital personal sacrifice was to the Soviet socialist workers’ struggle against the forces of Imperialism and Capitalist Exploitation. He knew, because he’d been told. Every day. As a boy in school, as an adolescent in the Young Pioneers, as an adult in on-the-job political-orientation sessions. He read it in Pravda and Izvestia, heard it on the radio, watched it on TV. Whizz, whir, clack-clack-clack: the voice of Lenin was playing like a tape recording inside his head. “Working People of the Soviet Union! Struggle for a communist attitude toward labor. Hold public property sacred and multiply it!”

“Meat,” cried a voice behind him. He squirmed round in disbelief — how could anyone be so insensitive as to voice a complaint in public? — and found himself staring down at the shriveled husk of an old woman, less than five feet tall, her babushkaed head mummy-wrapped against the cold. She was ancient, older than the Revolution, a living artifact escaped from the Museum of Serf Art. Akaky’s mouth had dropped open, the word “Comrade” flying to his lips in gentle remonstrance, when the man in front of him, impelled by the estuarine wash of the crowd, drove him up against the old woman with all the force of a runaway tram. Akaky clutched at her shoulders for balance, but she was ready for him, lowering her head and catching him neatly in the breastbone with the rock-hard knot in the crown of her kerchief. It was as if he’d been shot. He couldn’t breathe, tried to choke out an apology, found himself on the pavement beneath a flurry of unsteady feet. The old woman towered over him, her face as stolid and impassive as the monumental bust of Lenin at the Party Congress. “Meat,” she cried, “meat!”

Akaky stayed on another quarter of an hour, until a cordon of policemen marched up the street and superintended the closing of the store. It was 9:00 P.M. Akaky was beat. He’d been standing in one line or another since 5:30, when he left the ministry where he worked as file clerk, and all he had to show for it was eight russet potatoes, half a dozen onions, and twenty-six tubes of Czechoslovakian toothpaste he’d been lucky enough to blunder across while looking for a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Resigned, he started across the vacant immensity of Red Square on his way to Herzen Street and the Krasnaya Presnya district where he shared a communal apartment with two families and another bachelor. Normally he lingered a bit when crossing the great square, reveling in the majesty of it all — from the massive blank face of the Kremlin wall to the Oriental spires of Pokrovsky Cathedral — but now he hurried, uncommonly stung by the cold.

One foot after the next, a sharp echo in the chill immensity, ice in his nostrils, his shoulders rattling with the cold that clutched at him like a hand. What was it: twenty, twenty-five below? Why did it seem so much colder tonight? Was he coming down with something? One foot after the next, rap-rap-rap, and then he realized what it was: the overcoat. Of course. The lining had begun to come loose, peeling back in clumps as if it were an animal with the mange — he’d noticed it that morning, in the anteroom at the office — balls of felt dusting his shoes and trouser cuffs like snow. The coat was worthless, and he’d been a fool to buy it in the first place. But what else was there? He’d gone to the Central Department Store in response to a notice in the window—“Good Quality Soviet Made Winter Coats”—at a price he could afford. He remembered being surprised over the shortness and sparseness of the line, and over the clerk’s bemused expression as he handed him the cloth coat. “You don’t want this,” the clerk had said. The man was Akaky’s age, mustachioed. He was grinning. Akaky had been puzzled. “I don’t?”

“Soviet means shoddy,” the man said, cocky as one of the American delinquents Akaky saw rioting on the televised news each night.

Akaky’s face went red. He didn’t like the type of person who made light of official slogans — in this case, “Soviet Means Superior”—and he was always shocked and embarrassed when he ran across one of these smug apostates.

The man rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. “I’ll have something really nice here, well-made, stylish, a coat that will hold up for years after this shtampny is in the rubbish heap. If you want to meet me out back, I think I can, ah, arrange something for you — if you see what I mean?”

The shock and outrage that had seized Akaky at that moment were like an electric jolt, like the automatic response governed by electrodes implanted in the brains of dogs and monkeys at the State Lab. He flushed to the apex of his bald spot. “How dare you insinuate—” he sputtered, and then choked off, too wrought up to continue. Turning away from the clerk in disgust, he snatched up the first overcoat at random and strode briskly away to join the swollen queue on the payment line.

And so he was the owner of a shabby, worthless garment that fit him about as snugly as a circus tent. The lining was in tatters and the seam under the right arm gaped like an open wound. He should have been more cautious, he should have controlled his emotions and come back another day. Now, as he hurried up Herzen Street, reflexively clutching his shoulders, he told himself that he’d go to see Petrovich the tailor in the morning. A stitch here, a stitch there, maybe a reinforced lining, and the thing would be good as new. Who cared if it was ill-fitting and outdated? He was no fashion plate.

Yes, he thought, Petrovich. Petrovich in the morning.

Akaky was up at 7:00 the next morning, the faintly sour odor of a meatless potato-onion soup lingering in unexpected places, the room numb with cold. It was dark, of course, dark till 9:00 A.M. this time of year, and then dark again at 2:30 in the afternoon. He dressed by candlelight, folded up the bed, and heated some kasha and spoiled milk for breakfast. Normally he had breakfast in his corner of the kitchen, but this morning he used the tiny camp stove in his room, reluctant to march down the hallway and disturb the Romanovs, the Yeroshkins or old Studniuk. As he slipped out the door ten minutes later, he could hear Irina Yeroshkina berating her husband in her pennywhistle voice: “Up, Sergei, you drunken lout. Get up. The factory, Sergei. Remember, Sergei? Work? You remember what that is?”

It was somewhere around thirty below, give or take a degree. Akaky was wearing two sweaters over his standard-brown serge suit (the office wags called it “turd brown”), and still the cold made him dance. If it was any consolation, the streets were alive with other dancers, shudderers, sprinters, and vaulters, all in a delirious headlong rush to get back inside before they shattered like cheap glass. Akaky was not consoled. His throat was raw and his eyelids crusted over by the time he flung himself into Petrovich’s shop like Zhivago escaped from the red partisans.

Petrovich was sitting beneath a single brown lightbulb in a heap of rags and scraps of cloth, the antique pedal sewing machine rising up out of the gloom beside him like an iron monster. He was drunk. Eight o’clock in the morning, and he was drunk. “Well, well, well,” he boomed, “an early customer, eh? What’s it this time, Akaky Akakievich, your cuffs unraveling again?” And then he was laughing, choking away like a tubercular horse.

Akaky didn’t approve of drinking. He lived a quiet, solitary existence (as solitary as the six Yeroshkin brats would allow), very rarely had occasion to do any social drinking, and saw no reason to drink alone. Sure, he had a shot of vodka now and again to ward off the cold, and he’d tasted champagne once when his sister had got married, but in general he found drinking repugnant and always got a bit tongue-tied and embarrassed in the presence of someone under the influence. “I… I… I was, uh, wondering if—”

“Spit it out,” Petrovich roared. The tailor had lost an eye when he was eighteen, in the Hungarian police action — he’d poked his head up through the top hatch of his tank and a Magyar patriot had nailed him with a dexterously flung stone — and his good eye, as if in compensation, seemed to have grown to inhuman proportions. He fixed Akaky with his bulging protoplasmic mass and cleared his throat.

“—wondering if you could, ah, patch up the lining of my, ah, overcoat.”

“Trash,” Petrovich said.

Akaky held the coat open like an exhibitionist. “Look: it’s not really that bad, just peeling back a little. Maybe you could, ah, reinforce the lining and—”

“Trash, shtampny, brak. You’re wearing a piece of Soviet-bungled garbage, a fishnet, rotten through to the very thread of the seams. I can’t fix it.”

“But—”

“I won’t. It wouldn’t last you the winter. Nope. The only thing to do is go out and get yourself something decent.”

“Petrovich.” Akaky was pleading. “I can’t afford a new coat. This one cost me over a month’s salary as it is.”

The tailor had produced a bottle of vodka. He winked his eye closed in ecstasy as he took a long pull at the neck of it. When he righted his head he seemed to have trouble focusing on Akaky, addressing himself to a point in space six feet to the left of him.

“I’ll make you one,” he said, pounding at his rib cage and belching softly. “Down-lined, fur collar. Like they wear in Paris.”

“But, but… I can’t afford a coat like that—”

“What are you going to do, freeze? Listen, Akaky Akakievich, you couldn’t get a coat like this for five hundred rubles on the black market.”

Black market. The words made Akaky cringe, as if the tailor had spouted some vile epithet: faggot, pederast, or CIA. The black market was flourishing, oh yes, he knew all about it, all about the self-centered capitalist revisionists who sold out the motherland for a radio or a pair of blue jeans or — or an overcoat. “Never,” he said. “I’d rather wear rags.”

“Hey, hey: calm down, Akaky, calm down. I said I could get you one, not that I would. No, for five-fifty I’ll make you one.”

Five hundred and fifty rubles. Nearly three months’ salary. It was steep, it was outrageous. But what else could he do? Go back to the department store for another piece of junk that would fall apart in a year? He stepped back into the tailor’s line of vision.

“Are you absolutely sure you can’t fix this one?”

Petrovich shook his massive head. “No way.”

“All right,” Akaky said, his voice a whisper. “When could you have it done?”

“One week from today.”

“One week? Isn’t that awfully fast work?”

The tailor grinned at him, and winked his bloated eye. “I have my methods,” he said. “Rely on me.”

At the office that morning, while he crouched shuddering over the radiator in his worn overcoat, ragged sweaters, and standard-brown serge suit, Akaky became aware of a disturbance at his back: strident whispers, giggling, derisive laughter. He turned to look up into the grinning, wet-lipped faces of two of the younger clerks. They were wearing leather flight jackets with fur collars and blue jeans stamped prominently with the name of an American Jewish manufacturer, and they were staring at him. The shorter one, the blond, tossed his head arrogantly and made an obscene comment, something to do with mothers, sexual intercourse, and Akaky’s Soviet-made overcoat. Then he put a finger to his head in a mock salute and sauntered through the main door, closely tailed by his tall cohort. Akaky was puzzled at first, then outraged. Finally, he felt ashamed. Was he really such a sight? Shoulders hunched, he ducked down the hallway to the lavatory and removed overcoat and sweaters in the privacy of one of the stalls.

Akaky took his afternoon break in the window of a gloomy downstairs hallway rather than endure the noisy, overcrowded workers’ cafeteria. He munched a dry onion sandwich (he hadn’t seen butter in weeks), drank weak tea from a thermos, and absently scanned the Izvestia headlines. RECORD GRAIN HARVEST; KAMA RIVER TRUCK PLANT TRIPLES OUTPUT; AMERICAN NEGROES RIOT. When he got back to his desk he knew immediately that something was wrong — he sensed it, and yet he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. The others were watching him: he looked up, they looked down. What was it? Everything was in place on his desk — the calendar, the miniature of Misha the Olympic bear, his citation from the Revolutionary Order of United Soviet File Clerks for his twenty-five years of continuous service … and then it occurred to him: he was late. He’d dozed over lunch, and now he was late getting back to his desk.

Frantic, he jerked round to look at the clock, and saw in that instant both that he was as punctual as ever and that a terrible, shaming transformation had come over the life-size statue of Lenin that presided over the room like a guardian angel. Someone, some jokester, some flunky, had appropriated Akaky’s overcoat and draped it over the statue’s shoulders. This was too much. The bastards, the thoughtless, insensitive bastards. Akaky was on his feet, his face splotched with humiliation and anger. “How could you?” he shouted. A hundred heads looked up. “Comrades: how could you do this to me?”

They were laughing. All of them. Even Turpentov and Moronov, so drunk they could barely lift their heads, even Rodion Mishkin, who sometimes played a game of chess with him over lunch. What was wrong with them? Was poverty a laughing matter? The overcoat clung to Lenin’s shoulders like a growth, the underarm torn away, a long tangled string of felt depending from the skirts like a tail. Akaky strode across the room, mounted the pedestal and retrieved his coat. “What is it with you?” he sputtered. “We’re all proletarians, aren’t we?” For some reason, this fired up the laughter again, a wave of it washing over the room like surf. The blond tough, the punk, was smirking at him from the safety of his desk across the room; Moronov was jeering from beneath his red, vodka-swollen nose. “Citizens!” Akaky cried. “Comrades!” No effect. And then, shot through with rage and shame and bewilderment, he shouted as he had never shouted in his life, roared like an animal in a cage: “Brothers!” he bellowed.

The room fell silent. They seemed stunned at his loss of control, amazed to see that this little man who for twenty-five years had been immovable, staid as a statue, was made of flesh and blood after all. Akaky didn’t know what he was doing. He stood there, the coat in one hand, the other clutching Lenin’s shoulder for support. All at once something came over him — he suddenly felt heroic, an orator, felt he could redeem himself with words, shame them with a spontaneous speech, take to the pulpit like one of the revolutionary sailors of the Potemkin. “Brothers,” he said, more softly, “don’t you realize—”

There was a rude noise from the far side of the room. It was the blond tough, razzing him. The tall one took it up — his accomplice — and then Turpentov, and in an instant they were all laughing and jeering again. Akaky stepped down from the pedestal and walked out the door.

As rooms go — even in apartment-starved Moscow — Akaky’s was pretty small, perhaps half a size larger than the one that drove Raskolnikov to murder. Actually, it was the foyer of the gloomy four-room apartment he shared with the eight Yeroshkins, five Romanovs, and old Studniuk. The room’s main drawback, of course, was that anyone entering or leaving the apartment had to troop through it: Sergei Yeroshkin, on the tail end of a three-day drunk; Olga Romanov, necking with her boyfriend at the door while a whistling draft howled through the room and Akaky tried fitfully to sleep; old Studniuk’s ancient, unsteady cronies lurching through the door like elephants on their way to the burial ground. It was intolerable. Or at least it would have been, had Akaky given it any thought. But it never occurred to him to question his lot in life or to demand that he and Studniuk switch rooms on a rotating basis or to go out and look for more amenable living quarters. He was no whining, soft-in-the-middle bourgeois, he was a hard-nosed revolutionary communist worker and an exemplary citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When industrial production goals were met, the party leaders would turn their attention to housing. Until then, there was no sense in complaining. Besides, if he really wanted privacy, he could duck into the coat closet.

Now, coming up the steps and into the still, darkened apartment, Akaky felt like an intruder in his own home. It was two-fifteen in the afternoon. He hadn’t been home at this hour in thirteen years, not since the time he’d come down with a double attack of influenza and bronchitis, and Mother Gorbanyevskaya (she’d had Studniuk’s room then) had nursed him with lentil soup and herb tea. He closed the door on silence: the place was deserted, the dying rays of the sun suffusing the walls with a soft eerie light, the samovar a lurking presence, shadows in the corners like spies and traducers. Without a pause, Akaky unfolded his bed, undressed, and pulled the covers up over his head. He had never felt more depressed and uncertain in his life: the injustice of it, the pettiness. He was a good man, true to the ideals of the Revolution, a generous man, inoffensive, meek: why did they have to make him their whipping boy? What had he done?

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key turning in the lock. What now? he thought, stealing a glance at the door. The lock rattled, the bolt slid back, and old Studniuk was standing there in the doorway, blinking in bewilderment, a swollen string bag over his shoulder. “Akaky Akakievich?” he said. “Is that you?”

From beneath the blankets, Akaky grunted in assent.

“Blessed Jesus,” the old man shouted, “what is it: have you gone rotten in the stomach, is that it? Have you had an accident?” Studniuk had shut the door and was standing over the bed now: Akaky could feel the old man’s trembling fingertips on the bedspread. “Talk to me, Akaky Akakievich — are you all right? Should I call a doctor?”

Akaky sat up. “No, no, Trifily Vladimirovich, no need. I’m ill, that’s all. It’ll pass.”

With a crack of his ancient knees, old Studniuk lowered himself to the corner of the bed and peered anxiously into Akaky’s face. The string bag lay at his feet, bulging with cabbages, carrots, cheese, butter, bread, bottles of milk, and squarish packages wrapped in butcher’s paper. After a long moment, the old man pulled a pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket and began to roll a cigarette. “You don’t look sick,” he said.

All his life, Akaky had put a premium on truthfulness. When he was fifteen and assistant treasurer of the Young Pioneers, two of his co-workers had misappropriated the funds from a collection drive and no one in the group would expose them until Akaky came forward. The group leader had given him a citation for revolutionary rectitude which he still kept in a box with his school diploma and a photograph of his mother at the Tolstoi Museum. He looked Studniuk in the eye. “No,” he said. “I’m not sick. Not physically anyway.”

The old man rolled another cigarette with his clonic fingers, tucked the finished product behind his ear along with the first, and produced a handkerchief the size of a dish towel. He thoughtfully plumbed his nostrils while Akaky, in a broken voice, narrated the sad tale of his humiliation at the office. When Akaky was finished, the old man carefully folded up the handkerchief, tucked it in his shirt pocket, and extracted a paring knife from his sleeve. He cut the rind from a round of cheese and began sucking at bits of it while slowly shaking his head back and forth. After a while he said, “I’ve got some advice for you.”

Studniuk was the patriarch of the apartment complex, ageless, a man who didn’t have to look at newsreels to see history: it played in his head. He’d been there. For fifty-two years he’d worked in the First State Bearing Plant, present at its opening, a face in the crowd while successive generations of leaders came and went — Kerensky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchev. No one knew how old he was, or how he managed to live so well. He was jaunty, big-shouldered, bald as a fire hydrant; his nose had been broken so many times it looked like a question mark. Suddenly he was laughing, a sound like wind in the grass.

“You know,” the old man said, fighting for control, “you’re a good man, Akaky Akakievich, but you’re an ass.” Studniuk looked him full in the face, as hard and squint-eyed as a snapping turtle. “An ass,” he repeated. “Don’t you know that nobody gives half a shit about all this party business any more? Huh? Are you blind, son, or what? Where do you think I got all this?” he said, nodding at the sack of food with a belligerent jerk of his neck.

Akaky felt as if he’d been slapped in the face. The words were on his lips—“Betrayer, backslider”—but the old man cut him off. “Yes, that’s right: wheeling and dealing on the black market. And you’re a damn fool and an ass if you don’t go out there and get everything you can, because it’s for shit sure there ain’t no comrade commissioner going to come round and give it to you.”

“Get out of my room, Studniuk,” Akaky said, his heart pounding wildly at his rib cage. “I’m sorry. But, please get out.”

Wearily, the old man got to his feet and gathered up his things. He hesitated in the hallway, the ravaged nose glowing in the shadows like something made of luminescent wax. “I’ll tell you why they hate you, Akaky Akakievich, you want to know why? Because you’re a stick in the mud, because you’re a holier-than-thou, because you’re a party tool, that’s why. Because you go around in that goddamned flapping overcoat like a saint or something, that’s why.” The old man shook his head, then turned and receded into the gloom of the hallway.

Akaky didn’t hear him leave. He was biting his lip and pressing his hands to his ears with a fierce, unrelenting pressure, with the strict stoic rectitude of saints and martyrs and revolutionary heroes.

Petrovich was true to his word: the overcoat was ready in a week. It was a week to the day, in fact, that Akaky appeared at the tailor’s shop, full of misgivings and clutching a wad of ruble notes as if he expected them to wriggle through his fingers like worms or sprout wings and flutter up in his face. He’d exhausted his savings and sold his antique Tovstonogov Star TV set to come up with the money, a real hardship considering how inflexible his budget was. (For the past twenty-two years he’d been sending half of each paycheck to his invalid mother in the Urals. It seemed there’d been some sort of mysterious calamity in the area and the authorities had had to relocate her entire village. Ever since, she’d been pale and listless, her hair had fallen out, and she complained that her bones felt as if they’d gone hollow, like a bird’s.) The tailor was expecting him. “Akaky Akakievich,” he shouted, rubbing his hands together and ushering him into the shop, “come in, come in.”

Akaky shook Petrovich’s hand and then stood uneasily in the center of the shop while the tailor ducked into the back room to fetch the coat. Left alone, Akaky found himself surveying the place with a discerning eye, as if it were the shop he was buying and not merely an overcoat. The place was shabby, no question about it. Cracks rent the plaster like fault lines, soiled rags and odd scraps of cloth puddled up round his ankles like the aftermath of an explosion in a textile plant, a dish of roach poison glistened in the corner, pincushioned with the yellow husks of dead and dying insects. Could a man who worked in such squalor produce anything worthwhile — anything worth five hundred and fifty rubles?

There was a rustle of wrapping paper and Petrovich was at his side, holding out a loosely wrapped package in both arms, as if it were an offering. Akaky felt his stomach sink. The tailor swept an armful of half-finished garments to the floor and laid the package on the table. It was wrapped in soft white tissue paper, the sort of paper you see at Christmas, but then only in the store windows. Akaky reached out to touch it, and the tailor swept back the paper with a flourish.

Akaky was stunned. He was staring down at the overcoat of a prince, as fine as the one the Secretary himself wore, so handsome it was almost indecent. “You can’t—” he began, but he couldn’t find the words.

“Camel’s hair,” Petrovich said, winking his enormous eye. “That’s genuine fox, that collar. And look at the lining.”

Akaky looked. The lining was quilted with down.

“You don’t think you’ll be warm in that?” Petrovich said, breathing vodka fumes in his face and nudging him, “eh, Akaky Akakievich, eh?”

It’s such a small thing, an overcoat, a necessity of life — what’s to be so excited about? Akaky told himself as he slid into the coat and followed Petrovich into the back room to stand before the speckled mirror. What he saw reflected there drove the last vestige of composure from his body…. He looked … magnificent, dignified, like a member of the Politburo or the manager of the National Hotel, like one of the bigwigs themselves. He couldn’t help himself, he was grinning, he was beaming.

Akaky was late to work that morning for the first time in anyone’s memory. He strolled in at quarter past the hour, as though oblivious of the time, nodding benignly at this clerk or that. What was even more remarkable, from his fellow clerks’ point of view, was the way he was dressed — they recognized the cracked imitation vinyl gloves, the standard-brown serge trousers, and the great woolly black hat that clung to his head like an inflated rodent — but the overcoat, the fox-trimmed camel’s-hair overcoat, really threw them. Was this Akaky A. Bashmachkin, party tool and office drudge, strutting through the corridors like a coryphée with the Bolshoi, like an Olympic shot putter, like one of the apparatchiki? Had he been elevated to a supervisory position, was that it? Had he come into a fortune, held up a bank? A few heads turned toward the door, half expecting a cordon of KGB men to burst in and lead him away in disgrace.

No one had said a word to Akaky since the incident of a week before, but now, with furtive glances over their shoulders for the supervisor, Turpentov, Moronov, and Volodya Smelyakov — the elder statesman of the office, hoary-headed, toothless, and two months from retirement — gathered round Akaky’s desk. “Good morning, Akaky Akakievich,” Moronov slurred, his tongue already thickening from his morning pick-me-up, “nice day, isn’t it?” Moronov’s eyes were red as a pearl diver’s. Beyond the windows the sky was like steel wool, the wind was raging, and the temperature rapidly plunging from a high of minus twenty-eight degrees.

Akaky had no reason to be cordial to Moronov, nor did he approve of his drinking, but instead of fixing him with his usual bland and vaguely disapproving stare, he smiled, the upper lip drawing back from his teeth as if by the operation of some hidden, uncontrollable force. He couldn’t help it. He felt marvelous, felt like a new man, and not even Moronov, nor even the jeering blond tough, could sour his mood. The fact was, he was late because he’d lingered on the streets, despite the cold, to examine his reflection in shop windows and try out his new, magnanimous big-shot’s grin on strangers in Red Square. On a whim, he’d stopped in at a tourist shop for an outrageously overpriced cup of coffee and sweet bun. So what if he was late one morning out of five thousand? Would the world collapse round him?

Old man Smelyakov cleared his throat and smacked his gums amicably. “Well, well, well,” he said in the voice of a throttled bird, “what a lovely, lovely, ah”—the word seemed to stick in his throat—“overcoat you have there, Akaky Akakievich.”

“Yes,” Akaky said, slipping out of the coat and hanging it reverently on the hook beside the desk, “yes it is.” Then he sat down and began shuffling through a sheaf of papers.

Turpentov tugged at his knuckles. His voice was harsh, like a great whirring mill saw bogged down in a knotty log. “You wouldn’t want to trust that to the workers’ cloakroom, now would you,” he said, making a stab at jocularity. “I mean, it’s so ritzy and all, so expensive-looking.”

Akaky never even glanced up. He was already cranking the first report into his antiquated Rostov Bear typewriter. “No,” he said, “no, I wouldn’t.”

During the afternoon break, Akaky took his lunch amid the turmoil of the workers’ cafeteria, rather than in the solitary confines of the lower hallway. On the way in the door, he’d nearly run head-on into the surly blond youth and had stiffened, expecting some sort of verbal abuse, but the blond merely looked away and went about his business. Akaky found a spot at one of the long imitation Formica tables and was almost immediately joined by Rodion Mishkin, his sometime chess partner, who squeezed in beside him with a lunchbox in one hand and a copy of Novy Mir in the other. Mishkin was a thin, nervous man in wire-rimmed spectacles, who carried a circular yellow patch of hardened skin on his cheek like a badge and looked as if he should be lecturing on molecular biology at the Academy of Sciences. He had a habit of blowing on his fingertips as he spoke, as if he’d just burned them or applied fresh nail polish. “Well,” he said with a sigh as he eased down on the bench and removed a thickly buttered sausage sandwich from his lunchbox, “so you’ve finally come around, Akaky Akakievich.”

“What do you mean?” Akaky said.

“Oh come on, Akaky, don’t be coy.”

“Really, Rodion Ivanovich, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Mishkin was grinning broadly, his gold fillings glistening in the light, grinning as if he and Akaky had just signed some nefarious pact together. “The overcoat, Akaky, the overcoat.”

“Do you like it?”

Mishkin blew on his fingers. “It’s first-rate.”

Akaky was grinning now too. “You wouldn’t believe it — I had it custom-made, but I suppose you can see that in the lines and the distinction of it. A tailor I know, lives in squalor, but he put it together for me in less than a week.”

It was as if Mishkin’s fingertips had suddenly exploded in flame: he was puffing vigorously at them and waving his hands from the wrist. “Oh come off it, Akaky — you don’t have to put on a show for me,” he said, simultaneously flailing his fingers and nudging Akaky with a complicitous elbow.

“It’s the truth,” Akaky said. And then: “Well, I guess it wouldn’t be fair to say less than a week — it took him a full seven days, actually.”

“All right, all right,” Mishkin snapped, bending to his sandwich, “have it any way you want. I don’t mean to pry.”

Puzzled at his friend’s behavior, Akaky looked up to see that a number of heads were turned toward them. He concentrated on his sandwich: raw turnip and black bread, dry.

“Listen,” Mishkin said after a while, “Masha and I are having a few people from the office over tonight — for some dinner and talk, maybe a hand or two at cards. Want to join us?”

Akaky never went out at night. Tickets to sporting events, films, concerts, and the ballet were not only beyond his means but so scarce that only the apparatchiki could get them in any case, and since he had no friends to speak of, he was never invited for dinner or cards. In all the years he’d known Rodion Ivanovich the closest they’d come to intimacy was an occasional exchange on sports or office politics over a lunchtime game of chess. Now Rodion was inviting him to his house. It was novel, comradely. The idea of it — of dinner out, conversation, the company of women other than the dreary Romanov wife and daughter or the vituperative Mrs. Yeroshkina — suddenly burst into flower in his head and flooded his body with warmth and anticipation. “Yes,” he said finally, “yes, I’d like that very much.”

After work, Akaky spent two hours in line at the grocery, waiting to buy a small box of chocolates for his hostess. He had only a few rubles left till payday, but remembered reading somewhere that the thoughtful dinner guest always brought a little gift for the hostess — chocolates, flowers, a bottle of wine. Since he wasn’t a drinker, he decided against the wine, and since flowers were virtually impossible to obtain in Moscow at this time of year, he settled on candy — a nice little box of chocolates with creme centers would be just the thing. Unfortunately, by the time he got to the head of the line, every last chocolate in the store had been bought up, and he was left with a choice between penny bubble gum and a rock-hard concoction of peppermint and butterscotch coated in a vaguely sweet soya substance that sold for two to the kopeck. He took ten of each.

As he hurried up Chernyshevsky Street, clutching the scrap of paper on which Mishkin had scrawled his address, Akaky was surprised by a sudden snow squall. He’d thought it was too cold for snow, but there it was, driving at him like a fusillade of frozen needles. Cocking the hat down over his brow and thrusting his hands deep in his pockets, he couldn’t help smiling — the overcoat was marvelous, repelling the white crystals like a shield, and he was as warm as if he were home in bed. He was thinking of how miserable he’d have been in the old overcoat, shivering and stamping, dashing in and out of doorways like a madman, his bones rattling and nose running — when suddenly he felt an arm slip through his. Instinctively, he jerked back and found himself staring into the perfect oval of a young woman’s face; she had hold of his arm and was matching him stride for stride as if they were old acquaintances out for an evening stroll. “Cold night,” she breathed, looking up into his eyes.

Akaky didn’t know what to do. He stared into her face with fascination and horror — what was happening to him? — captivated by her candid eyes and mas-caraed lashes, the blond curls fringing her fur cap, the soft wet invitation of her Western lipstick. “I–I beg your pardon?” he said, trying to draw his hand from his pocket.

She had a firm grip on him. “You’re so handsome,” she said. “Do you work at the ministry? I love your coat. It’s so, so elegant.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve—”

“Would you like to take me out?” she said. “I’m available tonight. We could have a drink and then later—” She narrowed her eyes and squeezed his hand, still buried in the overcoat pocket.

“No, no,” he said, his voice strained and unfamiliar in his ears, as if he’d suddenly been thrust into a stranger’s body, “no, you see I can’t really, I–I’m on my way to a dinner engagement.”

They were stopped now, standing as close as lovers. She looked up at him imploringly, then said something about money. The snow blew in their faces, their breath mingled in clouds. Suddenly Akaky was running, hurtling headlong up the street as if a legion of gypsy violinists and greedy yankee moneylenders were nipping at his heels, his heart drumming beneath the standard-brown serge suit, the layers of down, and the soft, impenetrable elegance of his camel’s-hair overcoat.

“Akaky Akakievich, how good to see you.” Rodion stood at the door, blowing on his fingertips. Beside him, a short, broad-faced woman in an embroidered dressing gown, whom Akaky took to be his wife. “Masha,” Rodion said by way of confirmation, and Akaky made a quick little bow and produced the bag of sweets. To his consternation, he saw that in the confusion on the street it had gotten a bit crushed, and that some of the soya substance had begun to stain the bottom of the white confectioner’s bag. Masha’s smile bloomed and faded as quickly as an accelerated film clip of horticultural miracles. “You shouldn’t have,” she said.

The apartment was magnificent, stunning, like nothing Akaky could have imagined. Three and a half rooms, abundantly furnished, with oil paintings on the walls — and they had it all to themselves. Rodion showed him around the place. There was a new stove and refrigerator, a loveseat in the front room. Little Ludmila lay sleeping on a cot in the bedroom. “Really, Rodion Ivanovich, I’m impressed,” Akaky said, wondering how his friend managed to live so well. It was true that Rodion, as Deputy Assistant to the Chief File Clerk of the Thirty-second Bureau, made somewhat more than he did, and true too that Akaky was effectively operating on half pay because of his mother, but still, this was real opulence as far as he was concerned. Rodion was showing him the Swiss cuckoo clock. “It’s very kind of you to say that, Akaky. Yes”—puffing at his fingers—“we find it comfortable.”

There were a number of courses at dinner: a clear broth; fish in cream sauce; pickled sausages, white bread, and cheese; chicken, galushki, and Brussels sprouts. Rodion poured vodka and French wine throughout the meal, and afterward served a cherry cake and coffee. Akaky recognized some of the other guests from the office — faces but not names — and found himself engaged in a conversation with a man beside him over the melodic virtues of Dixieland jazz as opposed to the dissonance of free jazz. Akaky had never heard of either variety of jazz — in fact, he only vaguely knew what jazz was, a degenerate Negro sort of thing from America, with blaring horns and saxophones — but he smiled agreeably and asked an occasional question, while the man expatiated on one school of musical thought or another. Timidly, Akaky began to sip at the glass of wine before him; each time he turned around the glass was full again, and Rodion was beaming at him from the head of the table. He began to feel a depth of warmth and gratitude toward these people gathered around him, his comrades, men and women whose interests and knowledge ranged so far, whose wit flowed so easily: at one point he realized how much he’d been missing, felt that until now life had been passing him by. When Rodion proposed a toast to Masha — it was her birthday — Akaky was the first to raise his glass.

After the coffee, there was more vodka, a few hands of cards, and a good uproarious sing-along, all the old tunes Akaky had sung as a boy rising up from some deep hollow in him to burst forth as if he rehearsed them every day. He never missed a beat. When, finally, he thought to look at his watch, he was shocked to see that it was past one in the morning. Rodion’s eyes were bloodshot, and the patch of skin on his cheek seemed to have concentrated all the color in his face; Masha was nowhere to be seen, and only one other guest remained — the jazz man — snoring peaceably in the corner. Akaky leaped to his feet, thanked Rodion profusely—“Best time I’ve had in years, in years, Rodion Ivanovich”—and hurried out into the desolate streets.

It was still snowing. Silently, stealthily, while Akaky had been pulling strips of chicken from the bone, raising his glass and singing “How high the shrubless crags!” the snow had been steadily accumulating, until now it spread a flat, even finish over streets, stairways, and rooftops and clung like dander to the hoods of automobiles and the skeletons of neglected bicycles. Whistling, Akaky kicked through the ankle-deep powder, for once unmindful of his cracked imitation plastic galoshes and disintegrating gloves, the fox collar as warm as a hand against the back of his neck. As he turned into Red Square, he was thinking how lucky he was.

It was ghostly, the square, as barren as the surface of the moon, trackless and white. Behind him, Pokrovsky Cathedral, like some shrouded Turkish dream; ahead the dark bank of the Lenin Mausoleum and the soft, snow-blurred lights of the city. He was just passing the mausoleum when two men materialized before him. The one was tall, cheekbones like slashes, with a fierce Oriental mustache that disappeared in the folds of his muffler; the other was hooded and slight. “Comrade,” snarled the taller man, rushing at him out of the gloom, “that’s my coat you’ve got there.”

“No,” Akaky said, “no, you must be mistaken,” but the man had already taken hold of his collar and presented him with a bare fist the size of a football. The fist wavered under Akaky’s nose for an instant, then dropped into the darkness and hammered him three or four times in the midsection. Suddenly Akaky was on the ground, crying out like an abandoned infant, while the big man rolled him over and his accomplice tugged at the sleeve of the overcoat. Ten seconds later it was over. Akaky lay on the ground in his standard-brown serge suit and imitation plastic galoshes, doubled up in the fetal position, gasping for breath. The thugs were gone. In the near distance, the Kremlin wall drew a white line across the night. The snow sifted down with a hiss.

How he made it home that night, Akaky would never know. For a long while he merely lay there in the snow, stunned by the enormity of the crime against him, some last fiber of his faith and conviction frayed to the breaking point. He remembered the feel of the snowflakes brushing his lips and melting against his eyelids, remembered feeling warm and cozy despite it, remembered the overwhelming, seductive craving for oblivion, for sleep and surcease. As he lay there, drifting between consciousness and absence, the words of the First Secretary began to echo in his ears, over and over, a record stuck in the groove: “Our goal is to make the life of the Soviet people still better, still more beautiful, and still more happy.” Oh yes, oh yes, he thought, lying there on the ground. And then the man and woman had come along — or was it two men and a woman? — practically tripping over him in the dark. “My God,” the woman had gasped, “it’s a poor murdered man!”

They helped him to his feet, brushed the snow from his clothes. He was mad with the cold, with the hunger for justice — who said the world was fair or that everyone played by the same rules? — delirious with the fever of purpose. “The police!” he sputtered as a gloved hand held a flask of vodka to his lips. “I’ve been robbed.” They were solicitous, these people, faces and voices emerging dreamlike from the banks of swirling snow, but they were cautious too — distant even. (It was as though they weren’t quite sure what to make of his story — was he the victimized citizen he claimed to be, or merely a gibbering kopeck wheedler on the tail end of a drinking spree?) They guided him to the nearest precinct station and left him on the steps.

Pockets and cuffs heavy with snow, his eyebrows frosted over and lower lip quivering with indignation, Akaky burst through the massive double doors and into the cavernous anteroom of the Bolshaya Ordynka police station. It was about 3:00 A.M. Four patrolmen stood in the corner beneath the Soviet flag, drinking tea and joking in low tones; another pair sat together in the front row of an interminable file of benches, playing backgammon. At the far end of the chamber, on a dais, a jowly officer with thickly lidded eyes sat behind a desk the size of a pickup truck.

Akaky trotted the length of the room, a self-generated wind flapping round him, bits of compacted snow flying from his suit. “I’ve been beaten and robbed!” he cried, his voice strangely constricted, as if someone had hold of his windpipe. “In a public place. In Red Square. They took, they took”—here he felt himself racked by deep quaking bursts of sorrow so that he had to fight back the tears—“they took my overcoat!”

The desk sergeant looked down at him, immense, inscrutable, his head as heavy and shaggy as a circus bear’s. Behind him, a great faded mural depicted Lenin at the helm of the ship of state. After a long moment of absolute, drenching silence, the sergeant pressed a chubby hand to his eyes, then rattled some papers and waited for the clerk to appear at his side. The clerk, also in uniform, looked to be about eighteen or nineteen, his face cratered with acne. “You will fill out this form, comrade, delineating the salient details,” the clerk said, handing Akaky eight or ten pages of printed matter and an imitation ballpoint pen, “and then you will return at ten o’clock sharp tomorrow morning.”

Akaky sat over the form — Place of Employment, Birthdate, Mother’s Name and Shoe Size, Residence Permit Number, Previous Arrest Record — until past four in the morning. Then he handed it to the clerk, absently gathered up his hat and gloves, and wandered out into the teeth of the storm, as dazed and unsteady as the sole survivor of a shipwreck.

Akaky woke with a start at quarter past nine the following morning, the Ukrainian-made alarm clock having failed to go off on schedule. He was late for work, late for his appointment at the police station; his throat ached, a phlegmy cough clenched at his chest, and, worst of all, his overcoat was gone — gone, vanished, pilfered, three months’ salary down the drain. It hit him all at once, in the instant of waking, and he fell back against the pillow, paralyzed, crushed under the weight of catastrophe and loss of faith. “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!” he cried, taking the great man’s name in vain as the six smirking Yeroshkin brats trundled by his bed on their way to school, “what am I going to do now?”

If he could have buried himself then and there, piled the dirt eight feet high atop his bed, he would have done it. What was the sense in going on? But then he thought of the police — perhaps they’d apprehended the thieves, put them behind bars where they belonged; perhaps they’d recovered his overcoat. He pictured the bearlike sergeant handing it to him with his apologies, and then commending him for his alert description of the crime’s perpetrators and the swift and unhesitating way in which he’d filled out the crime report. As he pulled on the standard-brown serge trousers and imitation plastic boots, the image of the coat filled his consciousness and for a minute he was lost in reverie, remembering its softness, its lines, its snug and simple elegance. How long had he owned it — less than twenty-four hours? He wanted to cry.

His hand trembled as he knotted the olive-drab tie, finger-combed his hair, and tried to reach the office on Irina Yeroshkina’s telephone. “Hello? Kropotkin’s Laundry. May I be of assistance?” He hung up, dialed again. A voice immediately came over the wire, no salutation or identification, reading a list of numbers in a harsh, consonant-thick accent: “dva-dyevy-at-odin-chyetirye-dva-dva—” Akaky’s stomach was on fire, his head pumped full of helium. He slammed down the receiver, snatched up the sad, ragged tatters of his Soviet-made overcoat, and hurried out the door.

It was three minutes past ten when he hurtled through the doors of the police station like a madman, out of breath, racked with shivers and trailing a dirty fringe of knotted felt lining. He ran headlong into a hunched old grandmother in a babushka — what was it about her that looked so familiar? — and realized with a start that the room that had been so empty just six hours ago was now thronged with people. The old woman, who called him a rude name and set down a bag of beets to give him a clean two-armed shove, was standing in an endless, snaking line that cut back on itself and circled the room twice. Akaky followed the line to the end and asked a man in knee boots and Tatar hat what was going on. The man looked up from the chess puzzle he’d been studying and fixed Akaky with a cold eye. “I assume you have a crime to report, comrade?”

Akaky bit his lower lip. “They took my overcoat.”

The man held up a closely inscribed form. “Have you picked up your report yet?”

“Well, no, I—”

“First door to your left,” the man said, turning back to his puzzle. Akaky looked in the direction the man had indicated and saw that a line nearly as long as the first was backed up outside the door. His stomach turned over like an egg in a skillet. This was going to be a wait.

At four-thirty, just when Akaky had begun to despair of gaining admission to the inner sanctum of the police headquarters or of ever seeing his overcoat again, a man in the uniform of the OBKhSS marched down the line to where Akaky was standing, snapped his heels together, and said: “Akaky A. Bashmachkin?” The OBKhSS was a branch of the Ministry of Internal Security, officially designated “The Department for the Struggle Against the Plundering of Socialist Property.” Its job, as Akaky was reminded each day in the newspapers and on TV, was to curtail black-market activities by cracking down on the pirating of the people’s goods to pay for foreign luxury items smuggled into the country. “Yes.” Akaky blinked. “I–I’ve lost an overcoat.”

“Come with me, please.” The man spun on one heel and stamped off in the direction from which he’d come, Akaky hurrying to keep up. They breezed by the sixty or so scowling citizens who made up the forward section of the line, passed through the heavy wooden door into a room swarming with victims, suspects, police officers, and clerks, and then through a second door, down a hallway, and finally into a long, low-ceilinged room dominated by a glossy conference table. A single man sat at the head of the table. He was bald-headed, clean-shaven, dressed in slippers, slacks, and sports shirt. “Have a seat,” he said, indicating a chair at the near end of the table. And then, to the OBKhSS man: “Watch the door, will you, Zamyotov?”

“Now,” he said, clearing his throat, and consulting the form on the table before him, “you’re Akaky A. Bashmachkin, is that right?” His voice was warm, fraternal, spilling over the room like sugared tea. He could have been a country physician, a writer of children’s books, the genial veterinarian who’d tended the old cow Akaky’s grandmother had kept tethered outside the door when he was a boy in the Urals. “I’m Inspector Zharyenoye, Security Police,” he said.

Akaky nodded impatiently. “They’ve taken my overcoat, sir.”

“Yes,” said Zharyenoye, leaning forward, “why don’t you tell me about it.”

Akaky told him. In detail. Told him of the mockery he’d been exposed to at the office, of Petrovich’s promise, of the overcoat itself, and of the brutal, un-communist spirit of the men who’d taken it from him. His eyes were wet when he was finished.

Zharyenoye had listened patiently throughout Akaky’s recitation, interrupting him only twice — to ask Petrovich’s address and to question what Akaky was doing in Red Square at one-thirty in the morning. When Akaky was finished, Zharyenoye snapped his fingers and the antiplunderer from the OBKhSS stepped into the room and laid a package on the table. The inspector waved his hand, and the man tore back the wrapping paper.

Akaky nearly leaped out of his chair: there, stretched out on the table before him, as pristine and luxurious as when he’d first laid eyes on it, was his overcoat. He was overjoyed, jubilant, he was delirious with gratitude and relief. Suddenly he was on his feet, pumping the OBKhSS man’s hand. “I can hardly believe it,” he exclaimed. “You’ve found it, you’ve found my overcoat!”

“One moment, Comrade Bashmachkin,” the inspector said. “I wonder if you might positively identify the coat as the one you were deprived of early this morning. Has your name been sewed into the lining perhaps? Can you tell me what the pockets contain?”

Akaky wanted to kiss the inspector’s bald pate, dance him round the room: how good the policemen were, how efficient and dedicated and clever. “Yes, yes, of course. Um, in the right front pocket there’s an article clipped from the paper on cheese production in Chelyabinsk — my grandmother used to make her own.”

Zharyenoye went through the pockets, extracting seven kopecks, a pocket comb, and a neatly folded page of newsprint. He read the headline: “’Cheese Production Up.’ Well, I guess that proves ownership incontrovertibly wouldn’t you say, Mr. Zamyotov? — unless Comrade Bashmachkin is a clairvoyant.” The inspector gave a little laugh; Zamyotov, humorless as a watchdog, grunted his concurrence.

Akaky was grinning. Grinning like a cosmonaut on parade, like a schoolboy accepting the Karl Marx solidarity prize before the assembled faculty and student body. He stepped forward to thank the inspector and collect his overcoat, but Zharyenoye, suddenly stern-faced, waved him off. He had a penknife in his hand, and he was bending over the coat. Akaky looked on, bewildered, as the inspector carefully severed a number of stitches fastening the lining to the inner collar of the coat. With an impeccably manicured thumbnail, Zharyenoye prized a label from beneath the lining. Akaky stared down at it. Black thread, white acetate: MADE IN HONG KONG.

The animation had gone out of the inspector’s voice. “Perhaps you’d better sit down, comrade,” he said.

From that moment on, Akaky’s life shifted gears, lurching into a rapid and inexorable downward spiral. The inspector had finally let him go — but only after a three-hour grilling, a lecture on civic duty, and the imposition of a one-hundred-ruble fine for receiving smuggled goods. The overcoat, of course, became the property of the Soviet government. Akaky left the conference room in a daze — he felt as if he’d been squeezed like a blister, flattened like a fly. His coat was gone, yes — that was bad enough. But everything he believed in, everything he’d worked for, everything he’d been taught from the day he took his first faltering steps and gurgled over a communal rattle — that was gone too. He wandered the streets for hours, in despair, a stiff, relentless wind poking fingers of ice through the rotten fabric of his Soviet-made overcoat.

The cold he’d picked up in Red Square worsened. Virulent, opportunistic, the microbes began to work in concert, and the cold became flu, bronchitis, pneumonia. Akaky lay in his bed, ravaged with fever, unable to breathe — he felt as if someone had stuffed a sock down his throat and stretched him out on the stove to simmer. Mrs. Romanova tried to feed him some borscht; Irina Yero-shkina berated him for letting himself go. Her husband called a doctor, a young woman who’d been trained in Yakutsk and seemed to have a great deal of trouble inserting the thermometer and getting a temperature reading. She prescribed rest and a strong emetic.

At one point in his delirium Akaky imagined that three or four of the Yeroshkin children were having a game of darts over his bed; another time he was certain that the blond tough from the office was laughing at him, urging him to pull on his cracked imitation plastic galoshes and come back to work like a man. Old Studniuk was with him when the end came. The patriarch was leaning over him, his head blazing like the summer sun, his voice tense and querulous — he was lecturing: “Oh, you ass, you young ass — didn’t I tell you so? The blindness, the blindness.” The old gums smacked like thunder; the whole world shrieked in Akaky’s ears. “I suppose you think they built that wall in Berlin to keep people out, eh? Eh?” Studniuk demanded, and suddenly Akaky was crying out, his voice choked with terror and disbelief — he must have been reliving the scene in Red Square, his feet pounding the pavement, fingers clutching at the Kremlin wall, the thieves at his heels—“Faster!” he shouted, “faster! Someone get me a ladder!” And then he was quiet.

There were no ghosts haunting Moscow that winter, no vengeful, overcoat-snatching wraiths driven from uneasy graves to settle the score among the living. Nor was there any slowdown in the influx of foreign-made overcoats pouring across the Finnish border, channeled through the maze of docks at Odessa, packed like herring in the trunks of diplomats’ wives and the baggage of party officials returning from abroad. No, life went on as usual. Zhigulis hummed along the streets, clerks clerked and writers wrote, old Studniuk unearthed an antediluvian crony to take over Akaky’s room and Irina Yeroshkin found herself pregnant again. Rodion Mishkin thought of Akaky from time to time, shaking his head over a tongue sandwich or pausing for a moment over his lunchtime chess match with Grigory Stravrogin, the spunky blond lad they’d moved up to Akaky’s desk, and Inspector Zharyenoye had a single nightmare in which he imagined the little clerk storming naked into the room and repossessing his overcoat. But that was about it. Rodion soon forgot his former colleague — Grigory’s gambits were so much more challenging — and Zharyenoye opened his closet the morning after his odd little dream to find the overcoat where he’d left it — hanging undisturbed between a pair of sports shirts and his dress uniform. The inspector never had another thought of Akaky Akakievich as long as he lived, and when he wore the overcoat in the street, proud and triumphant, people invariably mistook him for the First Secretary himself.

(1981)

MEXICO

He didn’t know much about Mexico, not really, if you discount the odd margarita and a determined crawl through the pages of Under the Volcano in an alcoholic haze twenty years ago, but here he was, emerging pale and heavy from the sleek envelope of the airliner and into the fecund embrace of Puerto Escondido. All this — the scorching blacktop, the distant arc of the beach, the heat, the scent of the flowers and jet fuel, and the faint lingering memory of yesterday’s fish — was an accident. A happy accident. A charity thing at work — give five bucks to benefit the Battered Women’s Shelter and win a free trip for two to the jewel of Oaxaca. Well, he’d won. And to save face and forestall questions he told everybody he was bringing his girlfriend along, for two weeks of R&R — Romance and Relaxation. He even invented a name for her — Yolanda — and yes, she was Mexican on her mother’s side, gray eyes from her father, skin like burnished copper, and was she ever something in bed …

There were no formalities at the airport — they’d taken care of all that in Mexico City with a series of impatient gestures and incomprehensible commands — and he went through the heavy glass doors with his carry-on bag and ducked into the first cab he saw. The driver greeted him in English, swiveling around to wipe an imaginary speck of dust from the seat with a faded pink handkerchief. He gave a little speech Lester couldn’t follow, tossing each word up in the air as if it were a tight-stitched ball that had to be driven high over the fence, then shrank back into himself and said “Where to?” in a diminished voice. Lester gave the name of his hotel — the best one in town — and sat back to let the ripe breeze wash over his face.

He was sweating. Sweating because he was in some steaming thick tropical place and because he was overweight, grossly overweight, carrying fifty pounds too many and all of it concentrated in his gut. He was going to do something about that when he got back to San Francisco — join a club, start jogging, whatever — but right now he was just a big sweating overweight man with big bare pale legs set like stanchions in the floor of the cab and a belly that soaked right through the front of his cotton-rayon open-necked shirt with the blue and yellow parrots cavorting all over it. But there was the beach, scalloped and white and chasing along beside the car, palm trees and a hint of maritime cool, and before ten minutes had ticked off his watch he was at the hotel, paying the driver from a wad of worn velvety bills that didn’t seem quite real. The driver had no problem with them — the bills, that is — and he accepted a fat velvety tip too, and seven and a half minutes after that Lester was sitting in the middle of a shady tiled dining room open to the sea on one side and the pool on the other, a room key in his pocket and his first Mexican cocktail clenched in his sweating fist.

He’d negotiated the cocktail with the faintest glimmer of half-remembered high-school Spanish — jooze naranja, soda cloob and vodka, tall, with ice, hielo, yes, hielo—and a whole repertoire of mimicry he didn’t know he possessed. What he’d really wanted was a greyhound, but he didn’t know the Spanish word for grapefruit, so he’d fallen back on the orange juice and vodka, though there’d been some confusion over the meaning of the venerable Russian term for clear distilled spirits until he hit on the inspiration of naming the brand, Smirnoff. The waitress, grinning and nodding while holding herself perfectly erect in her starched white peasant dress, repeated the brand name in a creaking singsong voice and went off to fetch his drink. Of course, by the time she set it down in front of him it was already half-gone and he immediately ordered another and then another, until for the first twenty minutes or so he had the waitress and bartender working in perfect synchronization to combat his thirst and any real or imagined pangs he might have suffered on the long trip down.

After the fifth drink he began to feel settled, any anxiety over traveling dissolved in the sweet flow of alcohol and juice. He was pleased with himself. Here he was, in a foreign country, ordering cocktails like a native and contemplating a bite to eat — guacamole and nachos, maybe — and then a stroll on the beach and a nap before cocktails and dinner. He wasn’t sweating anymore. The waitress was his favorite person in the world, and the bartender came next.

He’d just drained his glass and turned to flag down the waitress — one more, he was thinking, and then maybe the nachos or a shrimp cocktail — when he noticed that the table at the far end of the veranda was occupied. A woman had slipped in while he was gazing out to sea, and she was seated facing him, barelegged, in a rust-colored bikini and a loose black robe. She looked to be about thirty, slim, muscular, with a high tight chest and feathered hair that showed off her bleeding eyes and the puffed bow of her mouth. There was a plate of something steaming at her elbow — fish, it looked like, the specialty of the house, breaded, grilled, stuffed, baked, fried, or sautéed with peppers, onions, and cilantro — and she was drinking a margarita rocks. He watched in fascination for a minute — semidrunken fascination — until she looked up, chewing, and he turned away to stare out over the water as if he were just taking in the sights like any other calm and dignified tourist.

He was momentarily flustered when the waitress appeared on his left to ask if he wanted another drink, but he let the alcohol sing in his veins and said, “Why not? — ¿Porqué no?”—and the waitress giggled and went off with her increasingly admirable rump moving at the center of that long white gown. When he stole another glance at the woman in the corner, she was still looking his way. He smiled. She smiled back. He turned away again and bided his time, but when his drink came he tossed some money on the table, rose massively from the chair and tottered across the room.

“Hi,” he said, looming over the chewing woman, the drink rigid in his hand, his teeth clenched around a defrosted smile. “I mean, Buenos tardes. Or noches.“

He watched her face for a reaction, but she just stared at him.

“Uh, ¿Cómo está Usted? Or tú. ¿Cómo estás tú?”

“Sit down, why don’t you,” she said in a voice that was as American as Hillary Clinton’s. “Take a load off.”

Suddenly he felt dizzy. His drink had somehow concentrated itself till it was as dense as a meteorite. He pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I thought … I thought you were—?”

“I’m Italian,” she said. “From Buffalo originally. All four of my grandparents came from Tuscany. That’s where I get my exotic Latin looks.” She let out a short bark of a laugh, forked up a slab of fish and began chewing vigorously, all the while studying him out of eyes that were like two scalpels.

He finished his drink in a gulp and looked over his shoulder for the waitress. “You want another one?” he asked, though he saw she hadn’t half-finished her first.

Still chewing, she smiled up at him. “Sure.”

When the transaction was complete and the waitress had presented them with two fresh drinks, he thought to ask her name, but the silence had gone on too long and when they both began to speak at the same time, he deferred to her. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

“Biotech. I work for a company in the East Bay — Oakland, that is.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? Is that like making potatoes that walk around the kitchen and peel themselves, that sort of thing? Cloning sheep? Two-headed dogs?”

Lester laughed. He was feeling good. Better than good. “Not exactly.”

“My name’s Gina,” she said, reaching out her hand, “but you might know me as ‘The Cheetah.’ Gina ‘The Cheetah’ Caramella?”

He took her hand, which was dry and small and nearly lost in his own. He was drunk, gloriously drunk, and so far he hadn’t been ripped off by the Federales or assailed by the screaming shits or leached dry by malarial mosquitoes and vampire bats or any of the other myriad horrors he’d been warned against, and that made him feel pretty near invulnerable. “What do you mean — you’re an actress?”

She gave a little laugh. “I wish.” Ducking her head, she chased the remnants of the fish round the plate with her fork and the plane of her left index finger. “No,” she said, “I’m a boxer.”

The alcohol percolated through him. He wanted to laugh, but he fought down the urge. “A boxer? You don’t mean like boxing, do you? Fisticuffs? Pugilism?”

“Twenty-three, two, and one,” she said. She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were bright. “What I’m doing right now is agonizing over my defeat two weeks ago at the Shrine by one of the queen bitches in the game, DeeDee DeCarlo, and my manager thought it would be nice for me to just get away for a bit, you know what I mean?”

He was electrified. He’d never met a female boxer before — hadn’t even known there was such a thing. Mud-wrestling he could see — in fact, since his wife died he’d become a big fan, Tuesday nights and sometimes on Fridays — but boxing? That wasn’t a woman’s sport. It was crazy. Drunkenly, he scrutinized her face, and it was a good face, a pretty face, but for the bridge of her nose, a telltale depression there, just the faintest misalignment — and sure, sure, how had he missed it? “But doesn’t it hurt? … I mean, when you get punched in the … body punches, I mean?”

“In the tit?”

He just nodded.

“Sure it hurts, what do you think? But I wear a padded bra, wrap ‘em up, pull ‘em flat across the rib cage so my opponent won’t have a clear target, but really, it’s the abdominal blows that take it out of you,” and she was demonstrating with her hands now, the naked slope of her belly and the slit of her navel, abs of steel, but nothing like those freakish female bodybuilders they threw at you on ESPN, nice abs, nice navel, nice, nice, nice.

“You doing anything for dinner tonight?” he heard himself say.

She looked down at the denuded plate before her, nothing left but lettuce, don’t eat the lettuce, never eat the lettuce, not in Mexico. She shrugged. “I guess I could … I guess in a couple hours.”

He lifted the slab of his arm and consulted his watch with a frown of concentration. “Nine o’clock?”

She shrugged again. “Sure.”

“By the way,” he said. “I’m Lester.”

April had been dead two years now. She’d been struck and killed by a car a block from their apartment, and though the driver was a teenage kid frozen behind the wheel of his father’s Suburban, it wasn’t entirely his fault. For one thing, April had stepped out in front of him, twenty feet from the crosswalk, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was blindfolded at the time. Blindfolded and feeling her way with one of those flexible fiberglass sticks the blind use to register the world at their feet. It was for a psychology course she was taking at San Francisco State—“Strategies of the Physically Challenged.” The professor had asked for two volunteers to remain blindfolded for an entire week, even at night, even in bed, no cheating, and April had been the first to raise her hand. She and Lester had been married for two years at the time — his first, her second — and now she was two years dead.

Lester had always been a drinker — and, for that matter, an abuser of recreational drugs — but after April’s death he seemed to enjoy drinking less and need it more, as if he were lowering himself hand over hand down a long tapering rope that led to some dark place reeking of vomit and vodka fumes. He knew it, and he fought it. Still, when he got back to his room, sailing on the high of his chance meeting with Gina — Gina the Cheetah — he couldn’t help digging out the bottle of Herradura he’d bought in the duty-free and taking a good long cleansing hit.

There was no TV in the room, but the air conditioner worked just fine and he stood in front of it awhile before he stripped off his sodden shirt, applied a fresh towel to his face and the swell of his gut and stepped into the shower. The water was tepid, but it did him good. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and repositioned himself in front of the air conditioner. When he saw the bottle standing there on the night table, he thought he’d have just one more hit — just one — because he didn’t want to be utterly wasted when he took Gina the Cheetah out for dinner. But then he looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven-twenty, and figured what the hell, two drinks, three, he just wanted to have a good time. Too wired to sleep, he flung himself down on the bed like a big wet dripping fish and began poking through the yellowed paperback copy of Under the Volcanco he’d brought along because he couldn’t resist the symmetry of it. What else was he going to read in Mexico — Proust?

“’No se puede vivir sin amor,’” he read, ‘You can’t live without love,’ and he saw April stepping out into the street with her puny fiberglass stick and the black velvet sleep mask pulled tight over her eyes. But he didn’t like that picture, not at all, so he took another drink and thought of Gina. He hadn’t had a date in six months and he was ready. And who knew? — anything could happen. Especially on vacation. Especially down here. He tipped back the bottle, and then he flipped to the end of the book, where the Consul, cored and gutted and beyond all hope, tumbles dead down the ravine and they throw the bloated corpse of a dog down after him.

The first time Lester had read it, he thought it was kind of funny, in a grim sort of way. But now he wasn’t so sure.

Gina was waiting for him at the bar when he came down at quarter to nine. The place was lit with paper lanterns strung from the thatched ceiling, there was the hint of a breeze off the ocean, the sound of the surf, a smell of citrus and jasmine. All the tables were full, people leaning into the candlelight over their fish and margaritas and murmuring to each other in Spanish, French, German. It was good. It was perfect. But as Lester ascended the ten steps from the patio and crossed the room to the bar, his legs felt dead, as if they’d been shot out from under him and then magically reattached, all in the space of an instant. Food. He needed food. Just a bite, that was all. For equilibrium.

“Hey,” he said, nudging Gina with his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said, flashing a smile. She was wearing shorts and heels and a blue halter top glistening with tiny blue beads. He was amazed at how small she was — she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. April’s size. April’s size exactly.

He ordered an Herradura and tonic, his forearms laid out like bricks on the bar. “You weren’t kidding before,” he said, turning to her, “—about boxing, I mean? Don’t take offense, but you’re so — well, small. I was just wondering, you know—?”

She looked at him a long moment, as if debating with herself. “I’m a flyweight, Les,” she said finally. “I fight other flyweights, just like in the men’s division, you know? This is how big God made me, but you come watch me some night and you’ll see it’s plenty big enough.”

She wasn’t smiling, and somewhere on the free-floating periphery of his mind he realized he’d made a blunder. “Yeah,” he said, “of course. Of course you are. Listen, I didn’t mean to — but why boxing? Of all the things a woman could do …”

“What? You think men have a patent on aggression? Or excellence?” She let her eyes sail out over the room, hard eyes, angry eyes, and then she came back to him. “Look, you hungry or what?”

Lester swirled the ice in his drink. It was time to defuse the situation, but quick. “Hey,” he said, smiling for all he was worth, “I’d like to tell you I’m on a diet, but I like eating too much for that — and plus, I haven’t had a thing since that crap they gave us on the plane, dehydrated chicken and rice that tasted like some sort of by-product of the vulcanizing process. So yeah, let’s go for it.”

“There’s a place up the beach,” she said, “in town. I hear it’s pretty good — Los Crotos? Want to try it?”

“Sure,” he said, but the deadness crept back into his legs. Up the beach? In town? It was dark out there and he didn’t speak the language.

She was watching him. “If you don’t want to, it’s no big deal,” she said, finishing off her drink and setting the glass down with a rattle of ice that sounded like nothing so much as loose teeth spat into a cup. “We can just eat here. The thing is, I’ve been here two days now and I’m a little bored with the menu — you know, fish, fish, and more fish. I was thinking maybe a steak would sound nice.” “Sure,” he said. “Sure, no problem.”

And then they were out on the beach, Gina barefoot at his side, her heels swinging from one hand, purse from the other. The night was dense and sustaining, the lights muted, palms working slowly in the breeze, empty palapas lined up along the high-water mark like the abandoned cities of a forgotten race. Lester shuffled through the deep sand, his outsized feet as awkward as snow-shoes, while children and dogs chased each other up and down the beach in a blur of shadow against the white frill of the surf and knots of people stood in the deeper shadows of the palms, laughing and talking till the murmur of conversation was lost in the next sequence of breakers pounding the shore. He wanted to say something, anything, but his brain was impacted and he couldn’t seem to think, so they walked in silence, taking it all in.

When they got to the restaurant — an open-air place set just off a shallow lagoon that smelled powerfully of seawrack and decay — he began to loosen up. There were tables draped in white cloth, the waiter was solicitous and grave and he accepted Lester’s mangled Spanish with equanimity. Drinks appeared. Lester was in his element again. “So,” he said, leaning into the table and trying to sound as casual as he could while Gina squeezed a wedge of lime into her drink and let her shoe dangle from one smooth slim foot, “you’re not married, are you? I mean, I don’t see a ring or anything—”

Gina hunched her shoulders, took a sip of her drink — they were both having top-shelf margaritas, blended — and gazed out on the dark beach. “I used to be married to a total idiot,” she said, “but that was a long time ago. My manager, Jerry O’Connell — he’s Irish, you know? From Cork City? In Ireland? — him and me had a thing for a while, but I don’t know anymore. I really don’t.” She focused on him. “What about you?”

He told her he was a widower and watched her eyes snap to attention. Women loved to hear that — it got all their little wheels and ratchets turning — because it meant he wasn’t damaged goods like all the other hairy-chested cretins out there, but tragic, just tragic. And needy. She asked how it had happened, a sink of sympathy and morbid female curiosity, and he told her the story of the kid in the Suburban and the wet pavement and how the student volunteers were supposed to have a monitor with them at all times, but not April, because she just shrugged it off — she wanted an authentic experience, and that was what she got all right. His throat seemed to thicken when he got to that part, the irony of it, and what with the cumulative weight of the cocktails, the reek of the lagoon, and the strangeness of the place — Mexico, his first day in Mexico — he nearly broke down. “I wasn’t there for her,” he said. “That’s the bottom line — I wasn’t there.”

Gina was squeezing his hand. “You must have really loved her.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I did.” And he had loved her, he was sure of it, though he had trouble picturing her anymore, her image drifting through his consciousness like something blown by a steady wind.

Another drink came. They ordered dinner, a respite from the intensity of what he was trying to convey, and then Gina told him her own tale of woe, the alcoholic mother, the brother shot in the face when he was mistaken for a gang member, the way she’d excelled in high school sports and nowhere to go with it, two years at the community college and a succession of mind-numbing jobs till Jerry O’Connell plucked her from anonymity and made her into a fighter. “I want to be the best,” she said, “number one — and I won’t settle for anything less.”

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

She looked at him. Her drink was half gone. “I know,” she said.

By the time they were finished with dinner and they’d had a couple of after-dinner drinks, he was feeling unbeatable again. It was quarter past eleven and the solicitous waiter wanted to go home. Lester wanted to go home too — he wanted to take Gina up to his room and discover everything there was to know about her. He lurched suddenly to his feet and threw a fistful of money at the table. “Want to go?” he said, the words sticking to the roof of his mouth.

She rose unsteadily from her seat and leaned into him while she adjusted the strap of her right heel. “Think we should take a cab?” she said.

“A cab? We’re just up the other end of the beach—”

She was staring up at him, small as a child, her head thrown back to take in the spread and bulk of him. “Didn’t you see that notice in your room — on the bathroom door? I mean, it sounds almost funny, the way they worded it, but still, I wonder.”

“Notice? What notice?” He found he was sweating again. He just looked at her.

She fished around in her purse until she came up with a folded slip of paper. “Here,” she said, “I wrote it down because it was so bizarre: ‘The management regrets to inform you that the beach area is unsafe after dark because of certain criminal elements the local authorities are sadly unable to suppress and advises that all guests should take a taxi when returning from town.’”

“Are you kidding? Criminal elements? This place is a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere — they ought to try the Tenderloin if they want to see criminal elements. And besides, besides”—he was losing his train of thought—“besides …”

“Yes?”

“There’s nobody in the whole country taller than five-four, as far as I can see.” He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Criminal elements!” And he was still shaking his head as they stepped out into the night.

Call it hubris.

They hadn’t gone two hundred yards, the night deepening, dogs howling in the hills, a potent fecal stench rising from the lagoon, and every star set firmly in its track, when they were jumped. It was nothing like the way Lester had visualized it while stalking home after the bars closed on 24th Street, half-hoping some sorry shithead would come up on him so he could break him in two — no words, no warning, no Give me your wallet or I’ve got a gun or This is a stickup. One minute he was trudging through the sand, a drunken arm draped hopefully over Gina’s shoulder, and the next he was on the ground, two pairs of booted feet lashing diligently at his face and ribs while a whole fluttering rush of activity washed around him, as if a flock of birds had burst up off the ground in a panic. He heard a grunt, a curse, the unmistakable crack of bone and cartilage rearranging itself, and it was Gina, Gina the Cheetah, whaling away at the shadows with both fists as he shoved himself up out of the sand and the boots suddenly stopped kicking and fled.

“You all right?” she said, and he could hear her hard steady breathing over the hammering of the waves.

He was cursing into the night—“Sons of bitches! Motherfuckers! I’ll kill you!”—but it was all bluster, and he knew it. Worse, so did she.

“Yeah,” he said finally, his chest heaving, the booze and adrenaline pulsing in his temples till the blood vessels there felt like big green garden hoses crawling up both sides of his head. “Yeah, I’m okay … I took a few kicks in the face maybe … and I think — I think they got my wallet …”

“Here,” she said, her voice oddly calm, “are you sure?” And then she was crouching, feeling around in the sand with spread fingers.

He joined her, glad to be down on his hands and knees and relieved of the effort of holding himself up, which suddenly seemed like such an unnecessary burden, and too much, way too much, to ask of his moribund legs. His wallet? He didn’t give a shit about any wallet. The sand was cool and the regular thump of the waves conveyed itself to him in the most immediate and prescient way.

“Les?” She was standing now, obscuring the stars. He couldn’t make out her face. “You sure you’re all right?”

From a great reeling distance he heard himself say, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Her voice was insistent, the voice of an intimate, a wife, a lover. “Come on, Les, get up. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Just give me a minute.”

Then there was a brightness, a burning hot soldered light fused to the cracks of the blinds, and he woke to find himself in his bed — his Mexican bed, in his Mexican hotel, in Mexico. Alone. Without Gina, that is. The first thing he did was check his watch. There it was, clinging like a manacle to his wrist, dividing his naked forearm from his meaty pale hand and indifferently announcing the time: two-thirty-two. All right. He heaved himself up to a sitting position, drained the plastic water bottle he discovered behind the tequila on the night table, and took a minute to assess the situation.

There was a rumor of pain between his ribs, where, he began to recall, two pairs of sharp-toed boots had repeatedly inserted themselves in the waning hours of the previous night, but that was nothing compared to his face. It seemed to ache all over, from his hairline to his jaw. He reached a hand to his cheek and felt a tenderness there, and then he worked his jaw till the pain became too much for him. His right eye was swollen closed, there was a drumming in his head and a vague nauseous feeling creeping up the back of his throat. To top it off, his wallet was missing.

Now he’d have to call up and cancel his credit cards, a real hassle, and he was a fool and an idiot and he cursed himself twice over, but it wasn’t the end of the world — he had ten thin crisp hundreds hidden away in his carry-on bag, or his shaving kit, actually, where no one would think to look for them. It could have been worse, he was thinking, but he couldn’t get much beyond that. How had he managed to get himself back last night? Or had Gina managed it? The thought made him burn with shame.

He took a tepid shower, clapped on a pair of coruscating silver-lensed sunglasses to mask the desecration of his eye, and limped down to the restaurant. She wasn’t there, and that was all right for the moment — he needed time to pull himself together before he could face her. The waitress was there, though, eternally responsive to his needs, wearing another down-to-the-toes peasant dress, this time in a shade of blue so pale it barely registered. She smiled and chirped at him and he ordered two tall Smirnoff and naranja with soda cloob and three fried eggs with tortillas and a fiery serrano salsa that cleared his airways and no doubt about it. He ate and drank steadily, hoping to dull the throbbing in his head, and when he looked up idly at the sea stretching beyond the veranda, he saw nothing but a desert of water. He had a third cocktail for equilibrium, then went down to the front desk and asked the attendant there if she knew which room Gina was staying in.

“Gina?” the woman echoed, giving him a blank look. “What family name, please?”

He had no idea. She’d told him, but it was gone now, obliterated by vodka, tequila, and half a dozen kicks to the head. All he could think of was her professional name. “’The Cheetah’?” he tried. “’Gina the Cheetah’?”

The woman’s hair was pulled back in a bun, her blouse buttoned up to her throat. She studied him a long moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

“Gina,” he repeated, and his voice got away from him a bit. “How many Ginas could there be in this place, for Christ’s sake?”

When she answered this time, she spoke in Spanish, and then she turned away.

He began a methodical search of the place, from pool to bar and back again, suddenly desperate — he had to explain to Gina about last night, joke it away, rationalize, apologize, spin shit into gold; she had to understand that he was down before he knew what hit him, that he was drunk and his judgment was impaired and if the circumstances were different he would have wiped the beach with those scumbags, he would have. Startled faces gaped up at him from the recliners around the pool, maids in pale green uniforms flattened themselves to the walls, he was sweating, he was huge, and where was she? And then he was out in the blast of the midday sun, searching through the palapas on the beach, hundreds of palapas, and practically every one with a sunburned tourist lounging beneath it. Soon he was sunburned himself, sweating rivulets and breathing hard, so he stripped off his shirt, threw himself into the waves and came up dripping to the nearest unoccupied palapa and sent a skinny little girl scurrying away to provide him with a piss-warm beer.

Several piss-warm beers later, he began to feel like himself again — and so what if he’d lost his shirt somewhere in the surf and the slope of his gut was as orange as a kumquat? He was in Mexico and he was drunk and he was going to go back to the hotel and find Gina and make it up to her, ask her to dinner, take a cab — a whole fleet of cabs — and buy her all the steak and lobster she could hold. It was past six by the time he got back to the hotel, and he went directly to the bar. She wasn’t there, so he figured he’d just station himself at a table that commanded a view of the walkway to the rooms, and wait till she came back from wherever she was.

They served him even though he wasn’t wearing a shirt — nobody in Mexico cared whether you had a shirt or not; you didn’t need shoes either, just feet and flesh and money. He drank tequila with wedges of lime and some true cold beers, and when the shadows began to lengthen he made the mistake of removing his sunglasses and frightening the waitress with his eye. By now, the place had begun to fill up, burned noses and seared shoulders, women in various states of deshabille, but still no Gina. He decided to make another foray up the beach to see if she’d maybe taken one of the water taxis over to Puerto Angel or Carizalillo and was only now coming back.

The sun was hanging on a string just over the horizon, pink and lurid, and the tourists were busy packing up their sunblock and towels and paperback novels while the dark people, the ones who lived here year-round and didn’t know what a vacation was, began to drift out of the trees with their children and their dogs to reclaim their turf. He smelled crushed flowers, the immitigable salt of the sea, fish fried in oil, shit. He kept walking, intent on the way his toes grabbed and released the sand, and he’d got halfway to the boats before he realized he’d left his sunglasses back on the table at the bar. No matter. He never even broke stride. They were nothing to him, one more possession, one more thing he could slough off like so much dead skin, like April’s desk and her clothes and the straw baskets and pottery she’d decorated the apartment with. Besides, there was hardly any glare off the water now and these people, these coppery dark little grimacing Indians who seemed to sprout up all over the beach once the sun began to close down, they needed to see him, with his flaming belly and his crusted cheekbone and savage eye, because this was what their criminal elements had done to him and he was wearing the evidence of it like a badge. Fuck you, he was muttering under his breath, fuck you all.

At some point, Lester looked up to orient himself and saw that he was just opposite the restaurant from last night. There it sat, squat amid the trees, its lights reflected on the surface of the lagoon. A soft glow lit the bar, which he could just make out, figures there, movement, cocktail hour. He had a sudden intimation that Gina was in there, her dark head bent over a table in back, a drunken intimation that counted absolutely for nothing, but he acted on it, slashing through the fetid lagoon in his sandals and shorts, mounting the three steps from the beach and drifting across the creaking floorboards to the bar.

It wasn’t Gina seated at the table but a local woman, the proprietress no doubt, totting up figures in a ledger; she raised her head when he walked in, but looked right through him. There were three men at the bar, some sort of police, in black shirts and trousers, one of them wearing dark glasses though there was no practical reason for them at this hour. They were smoking and talking quietly, in soft rasping voices. A plastic half-gallon jug of tequila stood before them on the bar, amid a litter of plates and three water glasses half-full of silvery liquid. They ignored Lester. He didn’t exist, despite the evidence of his bulging eye and cracked face, the swell of his sunburned belly and the salt-encrusted hair that stood straight out from his head like a fright wig. Lester addressed the bartender. “Margarita rocks,” he said. “With hielo.”

He sipped his drink, profoundly drunk now, but drunk for a reason — two reasons. Or three. For one thing, he had pain to kill, physical pain, and for another he was on vacation, and if you can’t be legitimately wasted on your vacation, then when can you be? The third reason was Gina. He’d come so close, and then he’d blown it. Criminal elements. He glanced up at the cops with an idle curiosity that turned sour almost immediately: where had they been when he needed them? Why weren’t they out on the beach at night, making the town safe for overweight gringos and their quick-fisted little gringa companions?

And then he noticed something that made his heart skip a beat: the boots. These guys were wearing boots, sharp-toed boots with silver toe-caps, the only boots in town. Nobody in Puerto Escondido wore boots. They could barely afford sandals, fishermen who earned their living with a hook and thirty feet of line wrapped around an empty two-liter Pepsi bottle, maids and itinerant merchants, dirt farmers from the hills. Boots? They were as likely to have Armani blazers, silk shirts, and monogrammed boxer shorts. Understanding came down like a hammer. He had to find Gina, had to tell her.

Dusk now, children everywhere, dogs, fishermen up to their chests in the rolling water, bats swooping, sand fleas leaping away from the blind advance of his feet. The steady flow of alcohol had invigorated him — he was feeling no pain, none at all — though he realized he’d have to eat something soon, and clean himself up, especially if he was going to see Gina, because his whole body was seething and rushing, and everything, from the palms to the palapas to the rocks scattered along the shore, seemed to have grown fur. Or fuzz. Peach fuzz. Peach fuzz on everything.

That really got to him, the peach fuzz — the conceit of it — and though he was angry and upset and had a big revelation to lay on Gina, he couldn’t help chuckling to himself and shaking his head in a wide rueful arc. That was when he stepped in the hole and went down awkwardly on his right side, his face plowing a furrow in the loose sand, and the bad eye, wet with fluid, picking up a fine coating of sharp white granules. But it was no problem, no problem at all. He rolled over and lay on his back awhile, laughing softly to himself. Criminal elements, he thought, and he was speaking the thought aloud as people stepped around him in the sand, sure, sure. And I’m the Pope in Rome.

When he finally got back to the hotel, to the palm-fringed courtyard with the reception desk and the bar/restaurant off to his right and the pool and guest rooms to his left, he hesitated. Just stood there glistening in the muted light like a statue erected in honor of the befuddled tourist. On the one hand, he was struck by the impulse to go back to his room, wash the grit from his body, do something with his hair and fish another shirt out of his bag; on the other, he felt an equally strong urge to poke his head in the bar for a minute — just a minute — to see if Gina was there. Ultimately, it was no contest. Up the stairs he went, feet thundering on the planks, the sand sparkling all over him as if he’d been dipped in sugar.

There. There was the waitress, giving him an odd look — a blend of hopefulness and horror — and the thicket of heads bent over plates and glasses, the air heavy as water, the bartender looking up sharply. Ever hopeful, Lester lurched out onto the floor.

This time he got lucky: Gina was sitting at a table just around the corner of the bar, the farthest table out on the veranda, her legs crossed at the knee, one shoe dangling from her toes. There was music playing somewhere, a faint hum of it leaking in out of the night, Mexican music, shot full of saccharine trumpets and weeping violins. It was a romantic moment, or it could have been. But Gina didn’t see him coming — she was turned the other way, in profile, the sea crashing behind her, her hair hanging limp to her shoulders — and it wasn’t till he’d rounded the end of the bar that he saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man sitting across from her, a drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Lester saw a dangle of red hair, muscles under a Lollapalooza T-shirt, the narrow face of an insect.

In the next instant he loomed up on the table, pulled out a chair and dropped into it with a thump that reverberated the length of the dining room. “Gina, listen,” he said, as if they were right in the middle of a conversation and the man with the insect face didn’t exist, “about last night, and you’re not going to believe this, but it was—”

And then he faltered. Gina’s mouth was hanging open — and this was a mouth that could cushion any blow, a mouth that knew the taste of leather and the shock of the punch that came out of nowhere. “Christ, Les,” she said, “what happened to you — you’re a mess. Have you looked in the mirror?”

He watched her exchange a glance with the man across the table, and then he was talking again, trying to get it out, the night, the way they’d come at him, and they weren’t just your average muggers, they were the law for Christ’s sake and how could anybody expect him to defend her from that?

“Les,” she was saying, “Les, I think you’ve had too much to drink—”

“I’m trying to tell you something,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, distant and whining, the voice of a loser, a fat man, the maker of bad guesses and worse decisions.

That was when the red-haired man spoke up, his eyes twitching in his head. “Who is this jerk, anyway?”

Gina — Gina the Cheetah — gave him a look that was like a left jab. “Shut up, Jerry,” she said. And then, turning back to Lester, “Les, this is Jerry — my manager?” She tried to inject a little air into her voice, though he could see she wasn’t up to it: “Seems like he can’t live without his meal ticket, even for three days.”

Jerry slouched in his chair. He had nothing to say.

Lester looked from Gina to Jerry and back again. He was very far gone, he knew that, but still, even through his haze, he was beginning to see something in those two faces that shut him out, that slammed the door with a bang and turned the key in the lock. He had no right to Gina or this table or this hotel either. He was nothing. He couldn’t even make it through the first round.

Gina’s voice came to him as if from a great distance—“Les, really, maybe you ought to go and lay down for a while”—and then he was on his feet. He didn’t say Yes or No or even See you later—he just turned away from the table, wove his way through the restaurant, down the stairs, and back out into the night.

It was fully dark now, black dark, and the shadows had settled under the skeletons of the trees. He wasn’t thinking about Gina or Jerry or the empty apartment on 24th Street or even April and the kid in the Suburban. There was no justice, no revenge, no reason — there was just this, just the beach and the night and the criminal elements. And when he got to the place by the lagoon and the stink of decay rose to his nostrils, he went straight for the blackest clot of shadow and the rasping murmur at the center of it. “You!” he shouted, all the air raging in his lungs. “Hey, you!”

(1997)